Right-wing Women

of her own condition or even as one who can report subjective

sensations or feelings with any integrity or acuity. She is overwrought not because of any objective condition in her life but because she is a woman and women get emotional and overwrought simply because that is how women are. Doctors have prescribed

tranquilizers to women for menstrual cramps, which have a physiological cause; for battery— the battered woman is handed a prescription and sent home to the batterer; for pregnancy—a woman is chem ically helped to accept an unwanted pregnancy; for many

* Testimony in 1978 by the acting director o f the National Institute on

Drug Abuse before the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and

Control.

physiologically rooted diseases that the doctor does not care to investigate (but he would examine a man carefully, not give a tranquilizer); and for physiological and psychological conditions that result from stress caused by environmental, political, social, or

economic factors. When a man and a woman go to doctors complaining of the same symptoms, she is dismissed or handed a tranquilizer and he is examined and given tests. Hysteria means suffering of the womb. Since antiquity it has denoted biological

womanhood. Freud is credited by some sentimentalists as a feminist because he insisted that men could be genuinely hysterical too.

He was the first to assert that hysteria could manifest in someone

without a womb. This was very liberal and rebellious, and Freud’s

was a lone voice. Medical opinion was that hysteria as a pathology

was exclusively limited to women because women had wombs and

because women were obviously hysterical. Despite Freud’s apostasy and its subsequent acceptance in psychoanalytic theory, hysteria is still associated with the female. She does not have reason or intellect; she has emotion. She starts with a lot of emotion by virtue of being female; when she gets more emotion than is socially acceptable, or when emotion begins to interfere with the exercise

of her female functions or the performance of her female duties,

then she is sedated or tranquilized. Female complaints to male doctors are perceived as emotional excrescences; and indeed, women learn as girls that either they convince through emotional display

or they do not convince at all, so that women do tend to persuade

by force of feeling and do learn early to compensate for the almost

certain knowledge that they will not be believed because they are

not credible no matter how accurate, restrained, or logical they are.

The solution to female emotional excess, whether expressed by the

woman—appropriately by her lights—or hallucinated by the male

doctor, is keeping women calm or numb or asleep with drugs. The

dulling of the female mind is neither feared nor noticed; nor is the

loss of vitality or independence. The female is valued for how she

looks—sometimes droopy eyelids are quite in fashion—and for do­

mestic, sex, and reproductive work, none of which requires that

she be alert. She is given drugs because nothing is lost when she is

drugged, except what is regarded as the too thick edge of her emotional life. She is given drugs because she is not much valued; she takes the drugs because she is not much valued; she stays on the

drugs because she is not much valued; the doctors keep prescribing

the drugs because she is not much valued; the effects of addiction

or dependency on her are not much noted because she is not much

valued. These are prescription drugs, regarded as appropriate medications for women. The junkie, for the most part, is left to the violent life of the streets; the woman addicted to prescribed drugs

has already been tamed and is kept tamed by the drugs. The drugs

are prescribed to these huge numbers of women each and every

year because their usage not only supports but significantly upholds social policy with respect to women: their effects reinforce women in traditional female roles, postures, and passivity; they

dull women’s perceptions of and responses to an environment and

predetermined social status that are demeaning, aggravating, and

enraging; they quiet women down. The use of these drugs to

numb these masses of women shows only how little women are

worth— to the doctors who do the prescribing, to the women

themselves, to the society that depends on this mass drugging of

women to help in keeping women as a class quiescent and women

as individuals invisible or aberrant. Thirty-six million women can

be tranquilized in a year and the nation does not notice it, does not

miss their energy, creativity, wit, intellect, passion, commitment—

so much are these women worth, so important is their contribution, so indelible is their individuality, so essential is their vigor.

In addition to being too emotional, women can be too fat. In

fact, it is hard not to be; and it is sometimes pointed out that

Amerikan standards of beauty dictate a leanness closer to the skeletal depravity of concentration camp victims than to any other socially recognized physiognomy. Most amphetamines are prescribed as diet pills, although women use them to propel themselves

through the normal routine of a day. Depression is commonplace

among women because housework is boring, sex is boring, cooking

is boring, children are boring, and the woman resents being bored

but cannot change it. Depression is commonplace among women

because women are often angry at the conditions of their lives, at

what they must do because they are women, at the way they are

treated because they are women; and depression truly is anger

turned inward. Depression is commonplace among women because

a woman’s life is often a series of dead ends, joy in which is the

measure of femininity. A decade or two ago, doctors prescribed

amphetamines with a reckless abandon. Now they are more cautious, and not only because amphetamines wreak havoc on the human body: amphetamines lead women away from femininity toward aggression, social dysphoria, and a paranoia that threatens

the women’s compliance as a sexual partner; tranquilizers and

sleeping pills interfere much less with the female life as it should be

lived, no matter how serious the addiction. Doctors justify the use

of amphetamines—by those 12 million women users in one year,

for instance—in terms of getting women thinner. Women get the

drug by saying they want or need to be thinner no matter how thin

they are; or doctors prescribe the drug without explanation as to its

qualities and effects—especially they make no reference to its addictive nature and to the high it produces. The woman knows her value is in becoming what the man wants to have; she has no sense

of self outside his evaluation of what she should be. Male doctors

essentially share the same male values; and women accept their

authority as men, not just as doctors. The woman’s body is evaluated according to a sexual aesthetic, not according to a medical ethic. Amphetamines prescribed by a doctor reinforce the misogynist rule that a woman’s only wealth is her body as an object; and that any act of self-destruction—like taking amphetamines— is

both justified and sexually enhancing if it makes her what men

want. Doctors accept and sometimes encourage this logic; doctors

often subscribe to it and pass it on to women. If women are not

thin, what are they? This is not a standard that can be applied to a

respected or self-respecting individual or to a respected or self-

respecting group; it is applied ruthlessly to women and it is not

applied to men.

But the doctors know that women use amphetamines not just to

get thinner but also to stay awake in the course of brutally soporific

days; to push aw ay paralyzing bouts of depression that come from

the quality of the woman’s life— her accurate perception of it; to

get the energy to put one foot in front of another in a life she hates

but feels powerless to change. So that even the use of amphetamines— with effects that are apparently opposite to those of tranquilizers and sedatives— keeps the woman in her life as it is and as a male-dominated society wants it to be; it keeps her functioning in

the domestic sphere, whether exclusively or not; it keeps her going

through the habits of being female; it keeps her executing the routines of a life that dissatisfies her profoundly. And the social imperative is to keep her there, no matter what the cost to her as an individual. So the doctors write the prescriptions. Prescribed

amphetamines keep the woman conforming when she was ready to

stop dead in her tracks, keep her female when she would rather be

genuinely inert and inanimate, keep her doing what she could not

bring herself to do without them.

These drugs— amphetamines,

tranquilizers,

sedatives— are

agents of social control; an elite male group does the controlling;

women are the class controlled. The willingness of the doctors—

male medical professionals—to use these drugs on women systematically and the perceptions of women that lead them to do so are evidence of the expendability of women, the essential worthlessness of women when measured against a human standard as opposed to a standard of female function. One does not dump drugs on society’s best and brightest; nor is a drug habit encouraged in

those who have work to do, a future with some promise, and a

right to dignity and self-esteem. Through the use of drugs, the

doctors are doing their part in the social control of women. T hey

have shown themselves willing—even eager sometimes—to go further. Decades ago clitoridectomies were all the rage as doctors did their surgical bit to control sexual delinquency in women. Now,

after being out of fashion for a few short years, the doctors are

trying to bring psychosurgery back into style. In a violent society,

they say, it is more than useful; it is necessary. The ideal patient

for lobotomy is considered to be a black female. Her violence, apparently, is simply in being a black female. She is ideal for the operation because afterward she can still perform the functions for

which she is best suited: she can be female in all the conventional

ways, and she can still clean other people’s houses.

Surgeons, however, need step in only where welfare programs

have already failed to provide a pool of cheap black female labor.

In R egulating the Poor: The Functions o f Public W elfare, * Frances Fox

Piven and Richard A. Cloward show that black women have been

given less money than white women in welfare payments and as a

result have had to do menial work to achieve the barest subsistence;

or have been kept off the welfare rolls altogether by administrators

who have manipulated regulations to exclude blacks, in keeping

with the racist policies of local or state governments. This pattern

of discrimination was particularly evident in the South, but it was

also found in other regions of the country:

There are many mechanisms by which Southern welfare departments deny or reduce payments to blacks, thus keeping them in the marginal labor market. The “employable mother”

rule [that a mother must work if the welfare agency determines

*A n important book that analyzes the economic value of racism under

capitalism but sadly fails to address the exploitation of women as such; as a

result, the social and sexual controls on the welfare population are understood superficially; the ubiquitous and almost self-renewing nature of the controls is not taken seriously enough— it is not recognized that as long as

the sexual oppression is intact, the controls will keep appearing, even if

reform seems to have eliminated them.

that there is appropriate work for her]. . . has been applied

discrim inatorily against black women: when field hands are

needed, Southern welfare officials assume that a black woman

is employable, but not a white woman. 8

These machinations of the welfare system are commonplace and

pervasive. A great effort has been made—contrary to public perceptions— to keep black women off the welfare rolls, to make them even more marginal and often even poorer than those on welfare.

The specifics can change— for instance, which women must work,

when, and w h y— but the kind of control the welfare system seeks

to exercise over poor women does not change. The first “em ployable mother” rule was invoked in Louisiana in 1943; Georgia adopted the same kind of regulation in 1952; in 1968 a federal court

in Atlanta struck down Georgia’s “employable mother” rule, which

was w idely considered to have negated the force of that rule in the

states where it existed; and yet in 1967 Congress had required

states to make mothers on welfare report for work or work training— a law erratically enforced and therefore subject to the same abuses as the old “employable mother” regulation. The kind of

control welfare exercises over poor women does not change because

the population welfare is designed to control does not change:

female.

The question of suitable employment is raised persistently

within the welfare system: what is to be expected of women with

children? should they work or stay home? what kind of work are

they offered or forced to take? is that work entirely determined by

prejudgments as to their nature— what can and should be expected

of them because they are female, female and black, female and

white, female and poor, female and unmarried? In New York C ity,

women on welfare say that they have been strongly encouraged by

welfare workers to turn to prostitution, the threat being that the

individual woman may in the future be denied welfare benefits be­

cause the caseworker knows the woman could be making big bucks

on the street; or in emergencies, women on welfare are told to raise

the money they need by turning a trick or two. In Nevada, where

prostitution is legal, women on welfare have been forced off welfare because they refused to accept the suitable employment of prostitution; once it is a legal, state-regulated job, there is no basis

for refusing it. Prostitution has long been considered suitable employment for poor women whether it is legal or not. This is particularly cynical in the welfare system, given the fact that women on welfare have been subjected to “fornication checks”—questioned about their sexual relations at length, questioned as to the identity of the fathers of so-called illegitimate children, questioned

as to their own sexual habits, activities, and partners—and have

been denied welfare if living with a man or if a man spends any

time in the domicile or if having a sexual relationship with a man.

Their homes could be inspected anytime: searches were common

after midnight, when the welfare workers expected to find the contraband man; the courts put a stop to late searches but daytime searches are still legal. Beds, closets, and clothes were inspected to

see if any remnant of a male presence could be found. Sometimes

criminal charges of fornication were actually brought against the

mothers of illegitimate children; the purpose was to keep them

from getting welfare. For instance, in one typical case, a New

Jersey woman was convicted of fornication and given a suspended

sentence; she was forced to name the father, who went to prison.

Welfare workers were allowed to interrogate children concerning

the social and sexual habits of their mothers. Women on welfare

have even been required to tell when they menstruate. Women on

welfare have had no rights to sexual privacy; and in this context,

turning them toward prostitution goes right along with refusing to

allow them private, intimate, self-determined sexual relations.

Prostitution is the ultimate loss of sexual privacy. Gains made in

the courts in the 1960s to restore rights of privacy to these women

are being nullified by new welfare policies and regulations designed

to control the same population in the same old w ays— practices

that reappear in new guises but are built on the same old attitudes

and impinge on the welfare population in the same old and cruel

ways. The state is a jealous lover, except when it pimps.

Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) is the largest

federal welfare program: this is welfare for women and their dependent children. As of 1977, 52. 6 percent of the recipients were white, 43 percent were black, and 4 . 4 percent were designated as

“American Indian and other. ” Welfare fundamentally articulates

the state’s valuation of women as women; the condition of women

determines the philosophical bases and practical strategies of the

welfare system; * the racist structure of class provides a framework

in which women can be isolated, punished, and destroyed as

women. In the welfare system, racism increases the jeopardy for

black women in particular in a m ultiplicity of w ays. But the degradation built into the welfare system in general and AFDC in particular originates in social attitudes toward women: in sexual contempt for women; in paternalistic assumptions about women; in

moral codes exclusively applied to women; in notions of immorality that have no currency except when applied to women.

Women not on welfare are cruelly hurt by these same endemic

woman-hating attitudes; but women on welfare have nothing between them and a police-state exercise of authority and power over them in which and by which they are degraded because they are

women and the state is the real head of the household. AFDC

controls women who have no husbands to keep them in line; it

caretakes women, keeps them always hungry and dependent and

desperate and accessible; it keeps them watching their children go

*This is not to suggest that welfare does not have devastating consequences for black men. It is to suggest that the whole system, including its impact on black men, is ultimately comprehensible only when we understand to what extent the feminizing of the oppressed is part of public policy and therefore fundamentally related to the degradation of women as

a class.

hungry and underclothed and uneducated; it tells them exactly

what they are worth to their lord and master, the state, in dollars

and cents. In 1979 they were worth $111 per month in Alabama,

$144 per month in Arkansas, $335 per month in Connecticut, $162

per month in Florida, and so on. In Hawaii they were worth most:

$389 per month. In Mississippi they were worth least: $84 per

month. In New York State, with the largest welfare budget, they

were worth $370 per month. These were average payments per

month per family (for the woman and her dependent children).

Suitable employment standards, for instance, in whatever form

they appear, are used to degrade women: to punish women for

being poor by enclosing them in a terrible trap—they have children to raise and the only work they are offered will not feed their children, it is degrading work, it is a dead end, it is meaningless, it

is intrinsically exploitative; and women with husbands who have

some money or good jobs or steady jobs are being pressured to stay

home and b e go o d mothers. How is the mother in the welfare population supposed to be a good mother? The answer is always the same: she is not supposed to have had the children to begin with,

and she is not supposed to have any more, and her suffering is no

more than she deserves. The welfare system combines the imperatives of sex and money: get a man to marry and support you or we will punish you and yours until you wish you were all dead. The

welfare system also combines the imperatives of morality and

money: your shameless bad ways got you knocked up, girl; now

you be good or we are going to do you in. Even when the issue is

suitable employment, it is always in the air: you wouldn’t be here

if you hadn’t done wrong; so where we send you is where you go

and what we tell you to do is what you do— because you deserve it

because you are bad.

So, in addition to suitable employment, the welfare system has

been—and will continue to be—preoccupied with what are called

“suitable homes” and with what can be called “suitable m orality, ”

something of a redundancy. Most AFDC programs were estab­

lished by 1940; by 1942 over half the states had “suitable homes”

laws. These laws demanded that women meet certain social and

sexual standards in order to qualify for welfare benefits: illegitim ate

children, for instance, would make a home not suitable; any infraction of conventional social behavior for women might do the same; any overt or noticeable sex life might do the same. The women

could keep the children— the homes were suitable enough for

that— but were not entitled to any money from the chaste government. As Piven and Cloward make very clear, this meant that the women had to work doing whatever menial labor they could find;

they simply had no recourse. But it also meant that the state had

become the instrument of God: welfare’s mission, from the beginning, was to punish women for having had sex outside of marriage, for having had children outside of marriage, for having had children at all— for being women. With righteousness on its side, the welfare program and those who made and executed its policies punished women through starvation for having “unsuitable homes, ” that is, illegitim ate children.

Mothers and their dependent children are purged en masse from

the welfare rolls whenever a state government decides its purity is

being sullied because it gives money to immoral women. A typical

purge, for instance, took place in Florida in 1959. Seven thousand

families with over 30, 000 children were deprived of benefits because of the suitable home law. According to a report for the then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, these families met

all the eligibility requirements for welfare but were denied benefits

“where one or more of the children was illegitimate. . . or where

the welfare worker reported that the mother’s past or present conduct of her sex life was not acceptable when examined in the light of the spirit of the law . ”9 Other states, including Northern states,

have done the same. By virtue of being illegitim ate, the children

are being reared in unsuitable homes; therefore, they can starve.

This is a fine exercise in state morality. The benefit to the state is

concrete: the women must do the cheapest labor; in economic

terms, welfare is a refined instrument of state power and of capitalism. In what looks like chaos, it accomplishes a serious goal—creating and maintaining a pool of degraded labor, cheaper than dirt. In terms of its other function, it is not so refined an instrument yet. It

is supposed to keep these women from having children; it is supposed to discourage them, punish them, force them to have fewer children. It is supposed to use the twin weapons of money and

hunger—reinforced by fear of suffering and death—to stop these

women from reproducing. Sterilization has a legislative history in

the United States: in 1915 thirteen states had mandatory sterilization laws (for “degenerates”); and by 1932 twenty-seven states had laws mandating sterilization for various kinds of social misfits. As

Linda Gordon said in Woman's B ody, Woman's R ight: “The sterilization campaign tended to identify economic dependence with hereditary feeble-mindedness or worse. ” 10 It has been proposed over and over again: if these women are going to keep having these bastards, after the second or third or fourth, we have the right to stop them, sterilize them—for their own good and because we are paying the bills. Sterilization has been practiced on poor women piecemeal. So far there is no judicial carte blanche that extends the power of the state explicitly to the tying of tubes because a woman

is on welfare. But when doctors sterilize Medicaid women, they

know they are acting in concert with the best interests of the government that administers welfare; and the government does not hesitate to pay the doctor for his good deed. So far, the strategies

of the state in stopping women on welfare from having children

have been crude. The government has tried to police their sexual

relations, enforce chastity, keep men out of their homes, punish

them for having illegitimate children, starve them and their children: state policy is one of absolute, cruel, murderous paternalism.

Welfare policy has usually been interpreted in terms of its impact on black men. From the state (police) side, the effort is to keep a shiftless man from living off the welfare benefits of a woman; to

keep men from defrauding welfare by using benefits intended for

women and children; to get black families back into the patriarchal

mode, that is, headed by males, for reasons of traditional morality

or economics; to force black men to marry black women and be

legally responsible for the children. From the antiracist side, w elfare policy has been seen as a blanket effort to destroy black men or the black fam ily, which, when headed by a woman, is seen as inherently degraded. The absent black male is the political focus and priority. But neither side penetrates to the real meaning of welfare

policy because both sides keep their eye on the man as the significant figure in the drama. The state, obviously, does not intend any economic dignity for that man or that same state would not promote black male unemployment in its economic policies and create a situation, through welfare, in which husbands are forced to abandon women and children so as to be sure they do not starve. From the antiracist perspective, the efforts of welfare have been deeper

and far more malevolent than can be realized if its impact on men

is seen as prim ary, because the effort has been to stop or significantly diminish reproduction through social control of women.

The notion that the state has acted to promote the conventional

male-dominated fam ily (by persecution of unmarried mothers, for

instance) is only superficially viable. If that were its real interest,

other state policies would support that same goal. Instead, welfare

policy has directly concerned itself with controlling women. The

most intrusive and degrading regulations back from the beginning

of welfare all have to do with women as women: all have to do with

a gender-specific regulation of motherhood and sex. These policies

all articulate the reproductive worth of women on welfare to the

state, and that value is almost entirely negative. *

The causes of the need for welfare (from the human, not the

state, point of view) are in the systematic economic discrimination

against women, with black women suffering the most stark eco­

*The one positive value is that the women and their progeny are cheap

labor, as discussed previously in this chapter.

nomic deprivation, and in the systematic sexual degradation of

women. Welfare is the barest maintenance for those who, being

female and poor, would otherwise slowly die. Those kicked off the

welfare rolls in the endless quest for those who are poor but pure

get jobs where they are paid less than welfare provides; and welfare

provides shit. They work, keeping those upholders of the Protestant work ethic happy, and go hungry at the same time. The poverty of women is appalling. As of December 1981, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment for females who

headed households was nearly twice that of males who headed

households: 10. 6 percent for the women; 5. 8 percent for the men.

Gay Talese, who wrote about the sex industry, found it meaningful in terms of sexual liberation that the women in massage parlors giving him handjobs were college graduates and even Ph. D . ’s. It is

meaningful—but in terms of what women have to do to earn

money, even with college educations and advanced degrees. The

welfare system that seeks to control women, and ultimately to destroy expendable women (black and poor white women, Hispanics, the females of any marginal groups), can count on the continuing

poverty of these women as women; they are never going to do

better because they are women and there are no social means to

enable them to do better, except marriage upward. The poverty of

these millions of women is assured; and so is the state’s continued

access to them; and so too is their continuing sexual humiliation by

state intrusion, the welfare agencies being thus far the major enforcement arm of state policy. Since reproductive containment (at best) has been the goal of welfare, there will be continued state

intrusion into the reproductive lives of poor women—with the endemic racism of the United States putting black women consistently at the highest risk. The intrusion will be under the guise of morality, as it has always been, a morality applied exclusively to

women, a morality that no right-wing senator or congressman

would ever think of using the state to apply to men. It will also be

disguised— by those more secular—as concern for the black fam­

ily: controlling the sexual promiscuity of the woman, reinstating

the black man in the master’s bedroom, such as it is on his block.

Under the surface, there w ill be a different truth: the state,

through the welfare system as a whole, wants to control the fertility of the woman and w ill not ever let the black man come in out of the cold. The state regulates the sexual use of non welfare women

for the benefit of men as a class, and it attempts to control the

fertility of nonwelfare women in cooperation with the men whose

interests it represents: the men who are lovers, fathers, husbands,

rapists, and police all at the same time. But the state directly ow ns

the sexuality of women on welfare— at least from its point of view

it does— and it wants to own their fertility outright too. Sometimes

the state explicitly exercises the ownership it has in enforcing so-

called moral standards for a subject group of women: sometimes it

punishes women for having had children against its w ill. The slow

starving and degrading of these women is not yet w idely viewed as

genocidal; genocide is not articulated as state policy. That is because the political and legal tools available to welfare in its pursuit of reproductive control of poor women have been crude. But illegal

abortion, which looms large on the horizon in the form of the monstrous Human Life Amendment, and forced sterilization, practiced sporadically so far but lurking for decades as what the government

really wants to do, w ill make a genocidal policy practical, effective,

and frankly inevitable. When abortion is illegal, black women, H ispanic women, and poor women get slaughtered. * Allowing the government to regulate the uterus— as in the Human Life Amendment— w ill directly preface an overt policy of forced sterilization.

Forced sterilization cannot be explicit state policy until a measure

like the Human Life Amendment is adopted: until abortion is absolutely reckoned murder legally and is punished as murder, so that the state is empowered literally to investigate the woman’s womb,

her menses, her discharges. Once every fertilized egg must be

*See chapter 3, “Abortion, ” pp. 9 8 -9 9 .

brought to term, what are we to do with all those poor, promiscuous, dumb sluts who keep having bastards? After all, doesn’t the government have the right to force such women to stop having

babies? isn’t the government paying for them? aren’t those women

immoral, fucking around and having babies for the money? If

every fertilized egg is going to be brought to term—under penalty

of a murder charge for failing to discharge that obligation—isn’t it

best just to insist that women taking government money have their

tubes tied? And doesn’t this combination of illegal abortion—prohibited in a way never existing before, prohibited from conception—and forced sterilization finally meet the not-so-hidden agenda of welfare: doesn’t it finally provide the state with a way to

control—absolutely and effectively—the fertility of poor women?

Enough poor women can be kept having enough babies to provide

whatever cheap labor is essential; but the rest are expendable.

And what is going to happen to women, these women and all

women, when the tools of reproductive control of women are no

longer technologically (medically) crude? when the technology

catches up with the political and legal leap into the Orwellian future? What is going to happen to women when life can be made in the laboratory and men can control reproduction not just socially

but also biologically with real efficiency?

The value of a female life is determined by its reproductive

value. What will happen to all the women who are not altogether

necessary because their children in particular are not altogether desirable? The old women starving in poverty are starving because their reproductive lives are over and they are worth nothing. The

old women incarcerated in cruel nursing homes are there because

their reproductive lives are over and they are worth nothing. The

women who are too poor or too black or brown and who have too

many children are starved and threatened and degraded and slowly

killed through state-sponsored neglect because they are having children, because they reproduce too much, because the value put on their reproducing is negative and characterized by annihilating

disregard. The women who are kept in line now, millions upon

millions of them each year, through the judicious application of

mood-altering drugs, are kept chem ically happy, calm, tranquil, or

energetic so that they w ill hang in there, have and raise the children and keep house for their husbands even though their lives fill them with distress and addiction is what keeps them conforming.

T hey too are part of a throwaway population of females: because

their own well-being is viciously subordinated to a predetermined

standard of what a woman is and what a woman does and what a

woman needs to be a woman (she needs to keep doing female

things, whether she wants to or not). What are the lives of all these

women worth? Is there anything in the w ay they are viewed or

valued that upholds their human dignity as individuals? T hey already matter very little. T hey are treated with cruelty or callous indifference. T hey have already been thrown aw ay. It is public

policy to throw them aw ay. What is going to happen to women

when reproduction— the only capacity that women have that men

really need (Portnoy’s piece of liver can substitute for the rest in

hard times)— is no longer the exclusive province of the class

women? W hat is going to happen to women who have only one

argument for the importance of their existence— that their reproductive capacities are worth a little something (shelter, food, solace, minimal respect)— when men can make babies?

*

And yet, there is a solitude which each and every

one o f us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner

being which we call ourself, no eye nor touch o f man

or angel has ever pierced. It is more hidden than the

caves of the gnome; the sacred adytum o f the oracle;

the hidden chamber o f Eleusinian m ystery, for to it

only omniscience is permitted to enter.

Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take,

dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speech,

January 18, 1892

There is no thing named love in the world.

Women are dinks. Women are villains. They are

creatures akin to Communists and yellow-skinned

people and hippies. We march off to learn about

hand-to-hand combat. Blynton grins and teases and

hollers out his nursery rhyme: “If ya wanta live, ya

gotta be ag-ile, mo-bile, and hos-tile. ” We chant the

words: ag-ile, mo-bile, hos-tile. We make it all

rhyme.

Tim O’Brien, I f I Die in a Combat Zone

There are two models that essentially describe how women are

socially controlled and sexually used: the brothel model and the

farming model.

The brothel model relates to prostitution, narrowly defined;

women collected together for the purposes of sex with men;

women whose function is explicitly nonreproductive, almost anti-

reproductive; sex animals in heat or pretending, showing themselves for sex, prancing around or posed for sex.

The farming model relates to motherhood, women as a class

planted with the male seed and harvested; women used for the fruit

they bear, like trees; women who run the gamut from prized cows

to mangy dogs, from highbred horses to sad beasts of burden.

These two poles of the female condition are only superficially

and conceptually distinct and opposite. Men say the two are poles

to begin with, distinct and opposite. That male conceit is registered and repeated until it is easier to repeat the concept by rote than to see the reality. But the concept is only accurate (descriptive) from a male point of view—that is, if one accepts the male definitions of both the acts involved and the women involved. In

the course of women’s lives, and therefore from a woman-based

perspective, the two conditions overlap and intersect, each reinforcing the efficacy of the other. Any woman can be both a prostitute and a mother, a prostitute and a wife (a potential mother), or one then the other in either order; and any woman can be subject

to the imperatives of both the brothel and the farming models of

female usage. On a grand scale, more women become mothers,

fewer prostitutes.

In general, the euphemisms of religion and romantic love keep

women from ever recognizing the farming model as having to do

directly and personally with them. Modern women do not think of

themselves as cows, nor as land that the man seeds; but maleheaded marriage incorporates both these vivid traditions of female definition; and the laws have been built on these same images and

ideas of what women are for; and the real history of women has

had as its center the actual use of women as cows and as land. The

w ay women are treated, valued, and used has remarkably little in

common with how women perceive themselves. The legend says

that vampires cannot see themselves in mirrors, but in this case the

vampires’ victims cannot see themselves: what would stare back—

the cow, the land, the uterus, the crop, the plowing, the planting,

the harvest, being put out to pasture, going d ry — would annihilate

the delusion of individuality that keeps most women going. The

laws that made women chattel derived from an analogy between

women and cows that hundreds of centuries of men found apt, and

the sexual slur was apparently a neutral observation infused with

the spleen of the moment— she’s a cow. The idea that the male

plants and the woman is planted in originates in antiquity, and

Marcuse among others has reiterated the idea that woman is the

land in more modern times. The farming model is not discussed as

such, even among feminists. It too clearly reveals the hopeless impersonality, degradation, and futility implicit in women’s subordinate position.

The brothel model is more familiar, partly because the situation

of prostitutes is held up to all women as warning, threat, inevitable

doom and damnation, the hellish punishment of girls gone wrong:

punishment for being women involved in sex without the protection of marriage and the purpose of reproduction; punishment for being bad or rebellious or sexually precocious; punishment for

being female without the cleansing sacraments.

In the brothel model, the woman is acknowledged to be for sex

without reference to reproduction. She will still have babies perhaps, but no one owes her anything: not the father, not the state, not the pimp, not the john, no one. Some women on the Left

accept the male leftist view that this is a giant step for womankind:

that this separation of sex and reproduction is in fact a form of

freedom—freedom from domestic constraint and domestic submission, freedom from an intrinsically totalitarian association of sex with reproduction. They do not recognize that in the brothel

model sex is dissociated from reproduction so that the sex can be

sold, so that sex (not babies) is what is produced, so that an intrinsically totalitarian association is forged between sex and money expressed lucidly in the selling of the woman as a sexual commodity.

In the brothel model, the woman is considered to be sexually free

even by those who think prostitution is bad or wrong; sexual freedom is when women do the things men think are sexy; the more women do these things, the more sexually free they are. Whatever

the conditions of the woman’s life, there is no perception that prostitution is by its nature antithetical to freedom. Sometimes the prostitute is construed to be economically liberated. In selling sex,

money passes through her hands: more money than the housewife

or the secretary will have in hand on any given night. The brothel

model particularly fosters these obfuscations of the female condition because the women are entirely interchangeable; perceived in terms of function they are entirely interchangeable; even among

themselves, any one could step out of her own life into the life of

the next woman and not notice the difference. Nothing that happens in the brothel is seen or has to be seen or recognized or re­

membered or reckoned with: these women live outside of history

and what happens to them happens behind closed doors and in a

place constructed to control the kind of women in it. T hey live

entirely on male terms. Whatever happens to them is appropriate

on those male terms because of what they do and what they are, all

of which is expressed in where they are. The impersonality of the

brothel as a working place is precisely congruent with the impersonality of their sexual function; men romanticize the place and the function for themselves, to themselves, for their own sakes, men

among men; but even men are not so dense as to try to romanticize

prostitution to the prostitute.

In the brothel model, the women are held to a strictly sexual

standard of behavior and accountability: they sell themselves for

sex, not to make babies. T hey do what men want them to do for

money that men pay them and that then they usually turn over to a

man. Women are defined strictly with reference to sex and they are

defined unfailingly without reference to personality or individuality or human potential; they are used without reference to anything but sex orifices and sex class and sex scenes. In the brothel model, several women belong to one man or in some cases are supervised by an older woman who is herself accountable to a rich man or men. The job of the women is to bring in— to a man or to a

house— a certain amount of money by servicing a certain number

of men. T hey sell parts of their bodies— vagina, rectum, mouth;

and they also sell acts— what they say and what they do. In

sex, they absorb, endure, or get indifferent toward an enormous

amount of male aggression, hostility, and contempt. Men have few

restraints in expressing to prostitutes—during sex or in any sexual

scenario— their real attitudes toward women as a class; they have

no reason to feel constrained, since the woman is there to be a

woman, period— to be inferior, subservient, and used. She is there

because the man wants a woman, someone exactly of her class,

someone who is her sex function, not human but an it, a cunt: she

is there for that reason, not for anything human in her. Her func­

tion is limited, specialized, sex-specific, and intensely and intrinsically dehumanizing.

It is essential to recognize how genuinely accepted both the

brothel model and prostitution are in the social structure, and how

this disposition of women is simply accepted as inevitable because

they are women. However evil prostitution is held to be, however

righteous or religious men are said to be, the brothel model does

more than endure; it thrives. However marginal the women are

said to be, they form the sex nucleus of a sex industry that is in no

sense marginal. The brothel model thrives because men accept it

and all that is part of it as proper treatment for sexual women:

women who are sexual in male terms, women who get fucked by

many men, women who get fucked outside the protective custody

of a traditional father or husband. The staying power of both the

brothel as an institution and prostitution as a practice comes from

the efficacy of both for regulating the sexual use of women and the

disposition of sexually exploitable women. Think of what it means.

The brothel is most often something like a prison—women cannot

come and go freely. Women are displayed, used, and treated like

sexual things or sexual animals, all penned up. The brothel exists

usually with the tacit or overt protection of police and politicians;

the brothel is used by the rich and powerful as well as by all other

kinds of men; the brothel is the kind of place men like to have

women in, confined in, locked in, penned in, shut in; the brothel

suggests a wealth of women available to the man, it means he is

rich in having so many women in one place for him, it means he

chooses absolutely and his will is done by whomever he chooses.

Prostitution is the way women are used in the brothel model; it is

what women are shut in for, penned in for. The street comer

merely extends the brothel beyond the walls of a building into the

cold and rain. Pimps run several prostitutes; and usually some or

all live together, whether business is done in the domicile or not.

This is a version of the brothel: a kind of public harem. The

brothel model can sim ply be imposed on a neighborhood, which

then becomes a ghetto for prostitutes. In some cities with good

reputations for socially advanced ideas, women sit in windows,

posing for potential customers. This is w idely regarded as a humane and civilized w ay of conducting the business of prostitution.

The brothel, in such cities, is considered a nice place, good for the

girls. It is the acceptance of the brothel model as an appropriate

w ay of treating some women, these women, sexed women, prostituted women, used women, degraded women, public women, any women, that has unyielding and unchanging social significance

for all women. Once a prostituted woman exists, she can be shut

up in a house where men come to find and use women like her, to

use her because she is a woman. It is naughty to force her to prostitute herself, though women and girls are m ainly forced into prostitution; but once prostituted— by whatever means— she is for sex and the brothel is her proper abode and the use made of her there

is proper; it is a woman’s place, and this is accepted by the religious and irreligious, police and outlaws, users and abstainers. A pimp’s women are referred to as his “stable, ” but the analogy with

horses is misleading. Horses are treated better, being more valuable. Prostitutes get treated like women; no analogy fits. For men this w ay of life would be seen clearly as a deprivation of human

freedom; for women it is appropriate to what they are— women.

These women are not missed; in fulfilling this sexual function, it is

not thought that they are wasted. There is a difference between

female garbage and human waste. In the United States, there are

hundreds of thousands of these women; in the world, millions

upon millions. The brothel model keeps these women locked in for

sex, and both the devout and the sexually liberated think that is the

way it should be. Both think this is a sexy w ay for women to live.

The women are disposed of, used for what they are seen to be,

used as their sex, their class-defined essence and function, the sex

work to which some percentage of the sex class must be dedicated.

This use of women is thought to be not only an inevitable and

appropriate use of women but one that always was and always will

be.

The defenses of the brothel model applied to women are entrenched. In his study of prostitution, first published in 1857, William Acton articulated what has come to be accepted as a moderate, sensible point of view:

It seems to me vain to shut our eyes to the fact that prostitution must always exist. Regret it as we may, we cannot but admit that a woman if so disposed may make profit of her own

person, and that the State has no right to prevent her. It has a

right, however, in my opinion, to insist that she shall not, in

trafficking with her person, became a medium of communicating disease, and that, as she has given herself up to an occupation dangerous to herself and others, she must, in her own interest and that of the community, submit to supervision. 11

The state creates the conditions in which the woman is prostituted,

sanctions force against her to effect her prostitution by systematically ignoring it, creates the economic conditions that mandate her prostitution, fixes her social place so that her sex is a commodity; and then, prostitution is seen to exist because the woman wills it and the political question is whether or not the state should

interfere with this expression of her will. What is seen as the eternal dimension of prostitution—why it must always exist—is that the will of women to prostitute themselves will always exist. This

means, simply, that men accept that the conditions that create

prostitution are acceptable, fixed, and appropriate because prostitution is a proper use of women, one congruent with what women are. The harm done is when she carries disease. Wherever prostitution is legal and regulated, it is usually to control disease, to protect men from disease; the woman is the instrument by which harm

comes to the man.

It is the social and economic construction of the woman’s will

that is the issue: both in that feminists assert that this w ill is constructed outside the individual and in that apologists for the sexual exploitation of women— again both religious and irreligious— insist

that the w ill is interior, individual, an individual assertion of a

female sexual nature.

The notion of female w ill always articulated in discussions of

prostitution (and currently pornography) also is central in a new

area of discourse on what women are for: surrogate motherhood. A

man, married to an infertile woman or on his own, wants a baby;

he buys the egg and the use of the womb of a surrogate mother— a

woman who w ill accept the introjection of his sperm through artificial insemination, gestate and give birth to what is contractually established as his child. In vitro fertilization— in which the egg is

extracted from a woman surgically, fertilized in a petri dish, then

vaginally introjected into the female— expands the possibilities

of surrogate motherhood. The uterus is exempt from the immune

response. Scientists already are able to remove the egg of one

woman, fertilize it outside her body, then introduce it into a second woman’s uterus, where it will gestate. * T hey have not done so, but there is no technological barrier to doing so. These two

reproductive technologies— artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization— enable women to sell their wombs within the terms of the brothel model. Motherhood is becoming a new branch of

female prostitution with the help of scientists who want access to

the womb for experimentation and for power. A doctor can be the

agent of fertilization; he can dominate and control conception and

* According to Gena Corea, an expert in these technologies and their

effects on women, “men are hoping to fertilize an egg inside a woman’s

body (in vivo), flush it out and then transfer that embryo to another

woman. That has not yet been done. ” Letter to the author, February 12,

1982. The pure sadism of this seems outstanding.

reproduction. Women can sell reproductive capacities the same

way old-time prostitutes sold sexual ones but without the stigma of

whoring because there is no penile intrusion. It is the womb, not

the vagina, that is being bought; this is not sex, it is reproduction.

The arguments as to the social and moral appropriateness of this

new kind of sale simply reiterate the view of female will found in

discussions of prostitution: does the state have a right to interfere

with this exercise of individual female will (in selling use of the

womb)? if a woman wants to sell the use of her womb in an explicit

commercial transaction, what right has the state to deny her this

proper exercise of femininity in the marketplace? Again, the state

has constructed the social, economic, and political situation in

which the sale of some sexual or reproductive capacity is necessary

to the survival of women; and yet the selling is seen to be an act of

individual w ill—the only kind of assertion of individual will in

women that is vigorously defended as a matter of course by most of

those who pontificate on female freedom. The state denies women

a host of other possibilities, from education to jobs to equal rights

before the law to sexual self-determination in marriage; but it is

state intrusion into her selling of sex or a sex-class-specific capacity

that provokes a defense of her will, her right, her individual self—

defined strictly in terms of the will to sell what is appropriate for

females to sell.

This individual woman is a fiction—as is her w ill—since individuality is precisely what women are denied when they are defined and used as a sex class. As long as issues of female sexual and reproductive destiny are posed as if they are resolved by individuals as individuals, there is no way to confront the actual conditions that perpetuate the sexual exploitation of women. Women by

definition are condemned to a predetermined status, role, and function. In terms of prostitution, Josephine Butler, a nineteenth-century crusader against prostitution, explained the obvious

implications of its sex-based nature:

M y principle has always been to let individuals alone, not to

pursue them with any outward punishment, nor drive them

out o f any p la ce so long as they behave decently, but to attack

organized p rostitu tion , that is when a third party, activated by

the desire of making money, sets up a house in which women

are sold to m en . 12

This is the opposite of what the state does when prostitution is

illegal: the state harasses and persecutes individual prostitutes and

leaves the institutions and the powerful who profit from them

alone. It does this because it is accepted that prostitution expresses

the w ill of the prostitute, and that therefore punishing her is the

proper expression of hostility toward prostitution. It is precisely

this notion of individual responsibility (when in fact there is only a

class-determined behavior) that perpetuates prostitution and protects the profits and power of those who sell women to men. Feminists, unlike the state, go after the institutions and the powerful, not the individual women, because feminists recognize above all

that the prostitute is created by material conditions outside herself. * In the new prostitution of reproduction, which is just beginning to unfold, the third party that w ill develop the female population for sale w ill be the scientist or doctor. He is a new kind

of pimp, but he is not a new enemy of women. The formidable

institutions of scientific research institutes and medical hospitals

will be the new houses out of which women are sold to men: the

use of their wombs for money.

*This does not mean that prostitution is reinvented in every generation

only through material conditions. The colonialization o f women is both

external and internal, as Kate Millett made clear in Sexual Politics. Sexual

exploitation and abuse create in women a psychological submission to self-

denigration; in The Prostitution Papers Millett went so far as to describe this

submission as “a kind o f psychological addiction to self-denigration. ” (See

The Prostitution Papers [New York: Avon, 1973], p. 9 6 . )

Before the advent of any reproductive technologies, the farming

model used to be very distinct from the brothel model. Even

though the woman was not human—the land—or was less than

human—a cow—farming had the symbolic overtones of old-fash-

ioned agrarian romance: plowing the land was loving it, feeding the

cow was tending it. In the farming model, the woman was owned

privately; she was the homestead, not a public thoroughfare. One

farmer worked her. The land was valued because it produced a

valuable crop; and in keeping with the mystique of the model itself, sometimes the land was real pretty, special, richly endowed; a man could love it. The cow was valued because of what she produced: calves, milk; sometimes she took a prize. There was nothing actually idyllic in this. As many as one quarter of all acts of battery

may be against pregnant women; and women die from pregnancy

even without the intervention of a male fist. But farming implied a

relationship of some substance between the farmer and what was

his: and it is grander being the earth, being nature, even being a

cow, than being a cunt with no redeeming mythology. Motherhood ensconced a woman in the continuing life of a man: how he used her was going to have consequences for him. Since she was

his, her state of being reflected on him; and therefore he had a

social and psychological stake in her welfare as well as an economic

one. Because the man farmed the woman over a period of years,

they developed a personal relationship, at least from her point of

view: one limited by his notions of her sex and her kind; one

strained because she could never rise to the human if it meant

abandoning the female; but it was her best chance to be known, to

be regarded with some tenderness or compassion meant for her,

one particular woman. Nevertheless, the archaic meaning of the

verb to husband is “to plow for the purpose of growing crops. ”

There is not a lot of room for tenderness or compassion in that.

Still, it is no wonder that women hang on possessively to any generic associations of women as such or “the female” with the land, nature, earth, the environment, even though those culturally sane-

tioned associations posit a female nature that is not fully human

and perpetuate a hard and mean tradition of exploitation: there is

some splendor and some honor in the association. The association

has a deep resonance for men too, though not the same sentimental

meaning: they after all did the plowing. The cultural and sexual

intersection of women and earth is potent for men when they

bomb “her, ” strip-mine “her, ” scorch “her, ” torch “her, ” denude

“her, ” defoliate “h er, ” pollute “her, ” despoil “her, ” rape “her, ”

plunder “h er, ” overcome, manipulate, dominate, conquer, or destroy “her. ” The significance of the farming model is both wide and deep. It has been the major w ay of using women— as mothers

to produce children; metaphorically speaking, men have used the

earth as if it were female, a huge fertile female that— one w ay or

another— they w ill fuck to death. There are limits to how much

the land can endure and produce, plowed so much, respected so

little.

Both the farming model and the brothel model dispose of women

as women: they are paradigms for the mass use of a whole class; in

both there is no hum anity for women. The brothel model has been

efficient. It uses the women in it until they are used up. Men get

sex from them with a graceful economy of means: effective force;

hunger, degradation, drugs; rare escape. The woman is easily reduced to what she sells. Women under the yoke of the brothel model do not organize political movements; they do not rebel collectively; the yoke is too heavy. Quite sim ply, a percentage of the class women is given over to the brothel model; whatever its laws,

societies accept this disposition of a significant number of females

for sex service. Once within that model, these women are controlled and used; what men want from them they get; their bodies go where their sex is wanted; there is an absolute equation between

what they are and what they provide, between their physical

bodies and their function, between their sex and their work. There

is no wasted energy here: a prostituted female serves her purpose

absolutely. The farming model has always been relatively ineffi­

cient. It is sloppier. Picking a woman who lives in the home with

the man on a continuing basis is harder. Picking a woman who can

and will have children is harder. There is more leeway for her

attitudes to interfere. She has ways of saying no or subverting male

sexual and reproductive intentions. The brothel model simply requires that the women under it be women: it does not matter who they are or what they are like or where they come from or what

they think; they get worn down fast by being used the same way

and being reduced to the same common denominator; nothing is

necessary except that they be female. The farming model requires

the constant application of force (explicit or implicit, usually a nice

combination), incentive, reward; and a lot of plain luck with respect to fertility and reproductive vigor. When a man wants sons, as most do, the inefficiency inherent in the model is particularly

emphasized: no matter how many babies she has, there is no certainty that any of them will be male. And, for all the coercion of the farming model, the women subject to it have organized politically, have found ways to seize the time between babies and domestic chores—here and there, now and then—to foment some rebellion. The very fact that such women have been involved in

movements, especially feminist movements, argues for the inefficiency of the farming model. The farming model has haphazard success: there are too many factors besides the efficacy of the fuck

that can interfere with the harvesting of the crop. The quality of

the crop cannot really be predetermined either. Men, recognizing

the inefficiency of the farming model, have simply imposed it on

all women not prostituted so as not to miss a chance: they use

social and economic sanctions to punish women who try to live

outside it, especially so-called spinsters and lesbians. To anticipate

and counterbalance the failures, the losses, the tremendous element

of chance, the bad breaks, the power of men as a class has been

exercised to keep all women not prostitutes reproducing under the

explicit domination of a husband. This has been the best way men

have had to control reproduction, to appropriate the uteruses of

women in order to have children, to keep the women subject to the

reproductive w ill of the men. The use of women by men in this

reproductive tyranny has been presented as what women are for: a

proper use of females, the best actualization of their human potential because, after all, they are women.

Reproductive technology is now changing the terms on which

men control reproduction. The social control of women who reproduce— the sloppy, messy kind of control— is being replaced by medical control much more precise, much closer to the efficiency

of the brothel model. T his change-over— applying the brothel

model to reproduction— is just beginning. It is beyond the scope of

this book to explore or explain all the new technological intrusions

into conception, gestation, and birth, * except to say that reproduction w ill become the kind of commodity that sex is now. Artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, sex selection, genetic engineering, fetal monitoring, artificial wombs that keep the fetus alive outside the mother’s body, fetal surgery, embryo transplants, and eventual cloning (some experts predict that human cloning w ill be

accomplished within twenty-five years; however long it takes, it

will be done)— all these reproductive intrusions make the womb

the province of the doctor, not the woman; all make the womb

extractable from the woman as a whole person in the same w ay the

vagina (or sex) is now; some make the womb extraneous altogether

or eventually extraneous; all make reproduction controllable by

men on a scale heretofore unimaginable. The issue is not the particular innovation itself—whether it is intrinsically good or bad; the issue is how it w ill be used in a system in which women are

sexual and reproductive commodities already, exploited, with lives

that are worthless when not serving a specific sexual or reproduc­

*See Gena Corea, The Mother Machine (forthcoming, 1984). This book will

explain the reproductive technologies, the experiments being done on

women and animals to develop the technologies, and the view of women

central to both the experimentation and the technologies.

tive purpose. For instance, cesarean sections saved women’s lives

when used in orthodox medical emergencies; but now doctors use

them because they give doctors dominion over labor, because they

involve cutting into the female body—a male pleasure—and so

that the natural process of birth can be circumvented for the social

convenience of the doctor. Cesarean sections are now used to express endemic male contempt for women. So it will be with reproductive technology or other medically sophisticated intrusions into reproduction. The ideology of male control of reproduction

will stay what it is; the hatred of women will stay what it is; what

will change will be the means of expressing both the ideology and

the hatred. The means will give conception, gestation, and birth

over to men—eventually, the whole process of the creation of life

will be in their hands. The new means will enable men—at last—

really to have women for sex and women for reproduction, both

controlled with sadistic precision by men.

And there will be a new kind of holocaust, as unimaginable now

as the Nazi one was before it happened: something no one believes

“mankind” capable of. Using now available or soon to be available

reproductive technology in conjunction with racist programs of

forced sterilization, men finally will have the means to create and

control the kind of women they want: the kind of women they

have always wanted. To paraphrase Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka

when she is defending Stalin’s purges, there will be fewer but better women. There will be domestics, sex prostitutes, and reproductive prostitutes. Is there any reason to think that this projected future does not reflect the commonly accepted devaluation of

women with which we live with relative complacency? Look again

at what we have done—are doing now—to the old, those in nursing homes, the drugged, the prostituted, those on welfare, and to those bastions of female worth, wives and mothers, whose rape the

law protects, whose battery the society invites, whose uteruses the

state wants.

*

We come after. We know now that a man can read

Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play

Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at

Auschwitz in the morning.

George Steiner, Language and Silence

Yet the enigma of woman’s nature (if she has, that is,

a nature, and is not merely a person altogether

equal, hoof to human hoof, with man), the enigma,

if it exists, is that women respond to him, of course

they do, it is the simple knowledge of the street that

murderers are even sexier than athletes. Something

in a woman wishes to be killed went the old wisdom

before Women’s Liberation wiped that out, something in a woman wishes to be killed, and it is obvious what does—she would like to lose the weakest part of herself, have it ploughed under, ground under, kneaded, tortured, squashed, sliced, banished, and finally immolated.

Norman Mailer, Genius and Lust

Not wanting to die, and knowing the sadism of men, knowing

what men can do in the name of sex, in the fuck, for the sake of

pleasure, for the sake of power, knowing torture, having been able

to predict all the prisons from her place in the bedroom and the

brothel, knowing how callous men are to those less than themselves, knowing the fist, bondage, the farming fuck and the brothel fuck, seeing the indifference of men to human freedom, seeing the

enthusiasm of men for diminishing others through physical domination, seeing the invisibility of women to men, seeing the absolute disregard of humanity in women by men, seeing the disdain of

men for women’s lives, and not wanting to die — and not wanting to

die—women propose two very different solutions for themselves in

relation to men and this man’s world.

The first honors the sexual and reproductive imperatives of men.

This is the right-wing solution, though those who pursue it are—

in terms of male-defined politics—all along the political spectrum

from far Right to far Left. In this solution, women accept the definition of their sex class, and within the terms of that definition fight for crumbs of self-respect and social, economic, and creative

worth. Socialist movements and revolutions are predicated on an

acceptance of this sex-class definition, as are right-wing movements

and counterinsurgencies. The far-Right expression of this solution

is usually highly religious, and it is the religious idiom that makes

it distinguishable from other expressions of what is essentially the

same accommodation to male power. Specifically, the sex-class accommodation is seen as a function of religious orthodoxy: in accommodating, women are faithful to a divine father; women accept traditional religious descriptions of women, female sexuality, and

female nature; women accept the duties of sexual and reproductive

submission to men. The far-Right solution translates the presumed

biological destiny of women into a politics of orthodox religion:

even in a secular republic, far-Right women live in a theocracy.

Religion shrouds women in real as well as magical grace in that the

sex-class functions of women are formally honored, carefully

spelled out, and exploited within clear and prescribed boundaries.

The second solution is offered by feminists. It proposes, in the

words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “the individuality of each human soul. . . In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny. . . ” 13 This is simply a recognition of the human condition, in which women are included. It is also the precondition for the realization of Marx’s greatest ethical

idea: from each according to her ability, to each according to her

need. It is the imposition of the sex-class definition of women on

women—by any means necessary—that devastates the human capacities of women, making them men’s subordinates, making them

“women. ” Feminists have a vision of women, even women, as indi­

vidual human beings; and this vision annihilates the system of gender polarity in which men are superior and powerful. T his is not a bourgeois notion of individuality; it is not a self-indulgent notion of

individuality; it is the recognition that every human being lives a

separate life in a separate body and dies alone. In proposing “the

individuality of each human soul, ” feminists propose that women

are not their sex; nor their sex plus some other little thing— a liberal additive of personality, for instance; but that each life— including each woman’s life— must be a person’s own, not predetermined before her birth by totalitarian ideas about her nature and her function, not subject to guardianship by some more powerful class, not determined in the aggregate but worked out by herself, for herself.

Frankly, no one much knows what feminists mean; the idea of

women not defined by sex and reproduction is anathema or baffling. It is the simplest revolutionary idea ever conceived, and the most despised.

In the face of advancing reproductive technology, there w ill be

even fewer women who dare claim their right to human life, human dignity, and human struggle as unique and necessary individuals, fewer and fewer women who will fight against the categorical disposition of women. Instead, more and more women w ill see

protection for themselves as women in religious and devotional ideologies that formally honor the special sanctity of motherhood.

This is the only claim that women can make under the sex-class

system to a sacred nature; and religion is the best w ay to make that

claim— the best available w ay. Against the secular power of male

scientists women w ill try to pit the political power of misogynist

males in religion. Women w ill try to use male theology and religious tradition wherever and however it sanctifies the mother giving birth. Women w ill hide behind theology; women w ill hide behind orthodox religious men; women w ill use conservative religious ideas against the science that w ill make women less necessary than they have ever been.

The power of the reproductive scientists w ill be advanced, how­

ever, precisely through the political and legislative initiatives of the

theocrats: prohibiting abortion and then mandating forced sterilization will establish absolute state control of the uterus. The clash between reproductive scientists and male theocrats in terms of absolute values—especially the orthodox formulation of what constitutes the family—only appears to be irresolvable. When these two schools of unconditional male power over women have to negotiate public policy to the mutual benefit of both, the men of theology, with that remarkable resourcefulness that allowed for the

burning of the witches, will find great virtue in any program in

which fertilized eggs truly do supersede women in importance.

They will also enjoy having both sex and reproduction on their

own terms: being God in the concrete rather than worshiping him

in the abstract. They will also enjoy— for its own sake—the extraordinary control they will have over women: more than Leviticus gives; more than Christ mandates; more than men have ever had, though no doubt still less than men deserve. Women will argue like the true believers they are for that old-time religion, but male theocrats will discover that God intended men to be the sole

creators of life all along: did not God himself create Adam without

female help and is not baptism the religious equivalent of being

born of a male God? This is not farfetched for those who justify

the subordination of women to men on the ground that God is a

boy.

Ironically, cruelly, so typical of history ineluctably moving on,

Right to Life groups are the only organized political opposition to

reproductive technology, especially in vitro fertilization, * and are

also the agents of its ascendancy in engineering legislation that

would give the uterus and the fertilized egg to the state to protect

and control. Even in giving the state the right to define when life

begins, which Right to Life groups insist on doing, Right to Life

*Each fertilized egg in a petri dish is regarded as a human life; each time

one is thrown away or “dies, ” murder has been done.

groups are taking that power from religion and transforming it into

a police power of the state. For the sake of religion, they are taking

from religion its moral authority to demand obedience from the

faithful and turning that authority over to a soulless state apparatus

incapable of moral discernment. They are taking from God what

no atheist would dare and giving to Caesar what he has never dared

claim for himself. The women in Right to Life groups want to

protect not fertilized eggs but motherhood and their own worth as

women in God’s eyes as well as man’s. They will learn the crudest

lesson of history: “Every decent End consumes itself. You kill

yourself trying to reach it, and by the time you get there it’s been

turned inside out. ” 14 The words were written by Soviet dissident

Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), but every passionate political activist of conscience—whatever the “decent End”—has had occasion to say them, in trouble and in grief. What one means to do goes

wrong, it becomes what one abhors. Right to Life women will see

it too late: they will stay mesmerized by the small tributes men pay

to the idea—not the reality—of women as mothers. The power the

Right to Life women are fighting so hard to put into the hands of

the state will eventually and inevitably be used (1) to redefine when

life begins and what life is so that the male becomes its sole creator

and (2) to determine and enforce which women reproduce, when,

and how. The women not needed will have no claim to civil dignity or civil protection. The reason for female submission finally will be very simple and overwhelmingly clear: for women submission will be a matter of life or death, with the right of appeal to the sacredness of women as mothers no longer in the vocabulary of

male supremacy.

When women cease to be altogether necessary, politically dissident women become altogether unnecessary. Once women are biologically expendable on a grand scale, political women need no longer be tolerated on any scale. Politically dissident women are

considered unnecessary now: this is the mood toward feminists and

other women who rebel; someday it will be policy, not a mood.

The criteria for politically dissident women—troublemakers—will

be extended to include any women not domestics, sex prostitutes,

or reproductive prostitutes. The religiously orthodox women will

find themselves characterized as politically dissident women one

day too: there they will be, advocating and upholding old laws,

customs, and ideas that are no longer in the best interests of men.

They will be demanding more than men want them to have and

there will be no concessions from men: because men will be able to

control reproduction without the mass complicity of women. Reduced to its simplest elements, the old misogyny was expressed by the ancient Greek Hipponax of Ephesus: “The two days in a

woman’s life a man can best enjoy are when he marries her and

when he carries her dead body to the grave. ” 15 In the misogyny of

the future—in the coming gynocide—he will have one day he can

best enjoy: “when he carries her dead body to the grave. ” We come

after, as George Steiner wrote; and we are women. We know what

men can do.

6

Antifeminism

some men

would rather see us dead than imagine

what we think of them/

if we measure our silence by our pain

how could the words

any word

ever catch up

what is it we could call equal

Ntozake Shange, “Slow Drag, ” from

Some Men

Feminism is a much-hated political philosophy. T his is true all

along the male-defined, recognizable political spectrum from far

Right to far Left. Feminism is hated because women are hated.

Antifeminism is a direct expression of m isogyny; it is the political

defense of woman hating. This is because feminism is the liberation movement of women. Antifeminism, in any of its political colorations, holds that the social and sexual condition of women essentially (one w ay or another) embodies the nature of women,

that the w ay women are treated in sex and in society is congruent

with what women are, that the fundamental relationship between

men and women— in sex, in reproduction, in social hierarchy— is

both necessary and inevitable. Antifeminism defends the conviction that the male abuse of women, especially in sex, has an im­

plicit logic, one that no program of social justice can or should

eliminate; that because the male use of women originates in the

distinct and opposite natures of each which converge in what is

called “sex, ” women are not abused when used as women—but

merely used for what they are by men as men. It is admitted that

there are excesses of male sadism—committed by deranged individuals, for instance—but in general the massive degradation of women is not seen to violate the nature of women as such. For

instance, a man’s nature would be violated if anyone forcibly penetrated his body. A woman’s nature is not violated by the same event, even though she may have been hurt. A man’s nature would

not provoke anyone to forcibly penetrate his body. A woman’s nature does provoke such penetration—and even injury is no proof that she did not want the penetration or even the injury itself, since

it is her nature as a woman to desire being forcibly penetrated and

forcibly hurt. Conservatively estimated, in the United States a

woman is raped every three minutes, and in each and every rape

the woman’s nature is at issue first and foremost, not the man’s act.

Certainly there is no social or legal recognition that rape is an act of

political terrorism.

Antifeminism can accommodate reform: a recognition that some

forms of discrimination against women are unfair to women or that

some kinds of injustice to women are not warranted (or entirely

warranted) by the nature of women. But underneath the apparent

civility, there are facile, arrogant assumptions: that the remedies

are easy, the problems frivolous; that the harm done to women is

not substantial nor is it significant in any real way; and that the

subordination of women to men is not in and of itself an egregious

wrong. This assessment is maintained in the face of proved atrocities and the obvious intractability of the oppression.

Antifeminism is always an expression of hating women: it is way

past time to say so, to make the equation, to insist on its truth.

Antifeminism throws women to the wolves; it says “later” or

“never” to those suffering cruel and system atic deprivations of liberty; it tells women that when their lives are at stake, there is no urgency toward either justice or decency; it scolds women for

wanting freedom. It is right to see woman hating, sex hatred, passionate contempt, in every effort to subvert or stop an improvement in the status of women on any front, whether radical or reform. It is right to see contempt for women in any effort to subvert or stop any move on the part of women toward economic or sexual independence, toward civil or legal equality, toward self-determination. Antifeminism is the politics of contempt for women

as a class. T his is true when the antifeminism is expressed in opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment or to the right to abortion on demand or to procedures against sexual harassment or to shelters for battered women or to reforms in rape laws. T his is true whether the opposition is from the H eritage Foundation, the Moral

M ajority, the Eagle Forum, the American Civil Liberties Union,

the Communist Party, the Democrats, or the Republicans. The

same antifeminist contempt for women is expressed in resistance to

affirmative action or in defenses of pornography or in the acceptance of prostitution as an institution of female sex labor. If one sees that women are being system atically exploited and abused,

then the defense of anything, the acceptance of anything, that promotes or continues that exploitation or abuse expresses a hatred of women, a contempt for their freedom and dignity; and an effort to

impede legislative, social, or economic initiatives that would improve the status of women, however radical or reformist those measures are, is an expression of that same contempt. One sim ply cannot be both for and against the exploitation of women: for it

when it brings pleasure, against it in the abstract; for it when it

brings profit, against it in principle; for it when no one is looking,

against it when someone who might notice is around. If one sees

how exploited women are— the systematic nature of the exploitation, the sexual base of the exploitation— then there is no political

or ethical justification for doing one whit less than everything—

using every resource—to stop that exploitation. Antifeminism has

been the cover for outright bigotry and it has been the vehicle of

outright bigotry. Antifeminism has been a credible cover and an

effective vehicle because the hatred of women is not politically

anathema on either the Right or the Left. Antifeminism is manifest

wherever the subordination of women is actively perpetuated or

enhanced or defended or passively accepted, because the devaluation of women is implicit in all these stances. Woman hating and antifeminism, however aggressive or restrained the expression, are

empirical synonyms, inseparable, often indistinguishable, often interchangeable; and any acceptance of the exploitation of women in any area, for any reason, in any style, is both, means both, and

promotes both.

Antifeminism breaks down into contempt for particular kinds of

women—as men envision the kinds of women there are. There is a

spectrum of insult. Lesbians, intellectuals, and uppity women are

hated for their presumption, their arrogance, their masculine ambition. Prudes, spinsters, and celibates may not want to be like men but they seem able to live without them; so they are treated with

contempt and disdain. Sluts, “nymphos, ” and tarts are hated because they are cheap, not expensive, and because they are their sex raw or sex itself. These epithets (often in ruder form) directed

against a woman are intended to malign her own relationship to her

own gender or to sexuality as men define and enforce it. The epithets are situational: chosen and applied not to show what she is in her essential self but to intimidate her in a particular situation. For

instance, if she does not want sex, she may be called a prude or a

dyke, and after she has had sex, she may be called—by the very

same observer—a slut. Expressing ideas a man does not like, she

may be a slut or a dyke or a prude—depending on how any given

man assesses her vulnerability to insult or depending on the man’s

own obsessional interest in prudes or sluts or dykes. Antifeminism

is in the reduction of a woman to perceptions of her sexuality or

relation to men or male sexuality; and antifeminism is in the ascribing of a specific masculine integrity to acts usually reserved for men— acts like making love with women or w riting books or w alking down the street without apology or speaking with authority.

Ideas and acts uphold the potency and cultural vigor of these epithets, which reflect real values— how women are disdained, w h y, what women do wrong and get punished for. The breaking down

of women into the insults used to describe women, the use of these

insults to describe or intim idate or discredit, granting validity to

these critiques of a female’s posture, pose, stance, attitude, or act,

are all expressions of both antifeminism and woman hating. When

a woman expresses an opinion— about anything— and the response

is to undermine perceptions of or question her sexuality, sexual

identity, fem ininity, relations with men, the response can be identified without further analysis as im plicitly antifeminist and woman-hating. It can and should be exposed as such. Antifeminism as a strategy for subverting what credibility women can muster runs the gam ut from subtle innuendoes to overt hostility, all of which is designed to remind the woman herself and those listening

to her that she is, after all, only a woman— and a defective one at

that. The woman hating im plicit in the antifeminism is designed to

humiliate the woman so that she feels the humiliation and so that

those listening can see her being humiliated and feeling it. Raising

and m anipulating antagonistic feelings toward a woman because

she is a woman, using her sex and sexuality, reminding her and

those around her of what she is and what she is f o r , are the same as

raising and m anipulating racist antagonisms against a black in a

white-supremacist context. The response to the underlining of her

sex so as to impugn her credibility should not rest on whether or

not one agrees with the woman about whatever issue; the response

should be a response to the antifeminism and misogyny being used

against her. It is w ay past time to recognize, to say, to confront,

the fact that women are isolated and destroyed by the ways in

which epithets discredit them. The epithets are symbolic reminders of what she is reduced to, not human, woman, that lower thing; the epithets are accusations that remind the accused of her

place as a woman and some alleged violation of its boundaries.

Women fear epithets because they are warnings, threats, proof that

a woman has made a wrong step in her relationship to the world

around her, proof that a man or men have noticed her and are

angry with her. Women fear these epithets because women fear the

anger of men. That anger is the substance of both antifeminism

and misogyny. The epithet is a weapon, whether hurled or delivered in a sulky or measured tone. The epithet is inevitably an act of hostility used in a spirit of vengeance. Calling a woman a name

temporarily brands her; it molds social perceptions of her in a way

that upholds her social inferiority; it frequently comes before the

fist or before the fuck, and so women learn to associate it with uses

of themselves that they abhor, hostile uses of themselves; and it

frequently comes as he hits, as he fucks. The epithet degrades a

woman by degrading her sex, sexuality, and personal integrity; it

expresses a serious, not a frivolous, hatred—the hatred of women,

a serious hatred with serious consequences to those against whom

it is directed. Epithets as sex-based insults are like machine-gun

rounds, fired off, bringing down whatever gets hit—anything

female around. The hints of these sex-based insults, shadowed references to them, evocations of them, are used with persistence and skill in the public devaluing of women—in hating women and in

the politics of contempt for women, in common discourse and in

cultural discourse. Every time this use of a lexicon of hatred passes

unremarked, every time the hate is expressed and there is no visible rebellion, no discernible resistance, some part of the woman to whom it happens dies and some part of any woman who watches

dies too. Each time the use of such an epithet or its evocation

passes without retaliation, something in women dies. Each time

slut, dyke, prude, is used to keep women intimidated and each

time its use is not repudiated (the repudiation cannot rest on

whether or not the accusation is in any sense accurate, only in its

use), antifeminism has stepped on another female life and crushed

some part of it; woman hating has humiliated and hurt another

woman or a woman again. Each time an honorable word— like lesbian— is used as a weapon of insult, or some honorable act— like a woman having sex because she wants to with a lover or lovers of

her choice— is used as a weapon of insult, or some honorable

choice— like being celibate— is used as a weapon of insult, the

women who are and who do and who choose are irrevocably hurt

and diminished. The answer is not as simple as losing one’s fear of

the words themselves (whether they apply or not), because any

woman would be a fool not to be afraid of what is behind the

words. Behind the words is the man who uses them and the power

of his whole class over the woman against whom they are used.

Each time contempt is expressed for the dyke, the prude, the slut,

hatred is being expressed toward all women. Whether the insults

are accepted in society, tolerated, encouraged, the main stuff of

humor, or m erely passively acquiesced in, the devaluing of women

is perpetuated, the intimidation of women is furthered. Each time

the insults are paraded or whispered— used against a woman as

insult— the insults gain in potency from use, acceptance, and repetition; and any woman, however much she is or is not what the insult conveys, is more liable to manipulation, distortion, extortion, slander, and harassment; and antifeminism and woman hating are that much more entrenched. Woman hating is the passion; antifeminism is its ideological defense; in the sex-based insult passion and ideology are united in an act of denigration and intimidation.

The tolerance for sex-based insult and its effectiveness in discrediting women are measures of the virulence of antifeminism and woman hating: how pervasive they are, how persuasive they are,

how deeply rooted they are, what chance women stand against

them. In our society, sex-based insult is the coin of the realm.

Women live defensively, not just against rape but against the language of the rapist—the language of what a woman is called in intimacy and in public, loud and soft.

Antifeminism is also articulated through social models, of which

there are three of continuing major importance: the separate-but-

equal model; the woman-superior model; and the trusty, familiar

male-dominant model.

The use of the separate-but-equal model is particularly cynical in

the United States, where that model applied to race was the foundation for systematic racial segregation enforced by police power.

Equality was always a chimera or a lie; separation was real. The

model held that social institutions could be reasonably and fairly

constructed on the basis of biology, for instance, race or skin color.

What made separation necessary—the presumed inferiority of one

of the biologically defined groups—made equality impossible. The

idea of separation and the institutions of separation derived from a

social inequality of such astonishing magnitude and crass cruelty

that separation in idea or practice essentially denied that blacks had

a human nature in common with whites or any common human

standing. The separate-but-equal model itself originates in the conviction that men and women could not stand on common human ground. The model originates in the effort to justify the subordination of women to men (and in the justification to perpetuate that subordination) by positing male and female natures so biologically

different as to require social separation, socially antithetical paths,

social life bifurcated by sex so that there are two cultures, one

male, one female, coexisting in the same society. The separate-but-

equal model applied to sex predated the variation of the model applied to race. With respect to sex, the separate-but-equal model held that women and men were destined by biology for different

social spheres. The spheres were separate but equal, which made

the men and women separate but equal. The sphere of the woman

was the home; the sphere of the man was the world. These were

separate-but-equal domains. The woman was supposed to bear and

raise the children; the man was supposed to impregnate her and

support them. These were separate-but-equal duties. The woman

had female capacities— she was intuitive, emotional, tender,

charming (in women a capacity to arouse or entrap, not an attribute). T he man had male capacities— he was logical, reasoning, strong, powerful (as a capacity and relative to the woman). These

were separate-but-equal capacities. The woman was supposed to

do domestic labor, the precise nature of which was determined by

her husband’s social class. The man was supposed to labor in the

world for money, power, recognition, according to his social class.

This was separate-but-equal labor.

Sex segregation in practice is necessarily different from race segregation: women are everywhere, in almost every home, in most beds, as intim ate as it is possible to be with those who want to keep

them separate. Given the nearly universal intim acy women have

with men, it is astonishing to recognize how successful sex-segre-

gation bolstered by the separate-but-equal model has been and

continues to be. Women have invaded the male sphere of the marketplace, only to be segregated in female job ghettos. In jobs, duties, responsibilities, physical, moral, and intellectual capacities, division of labor within the home, the ethic and practice that still

obtains is sex segregation. The separate-but-equal model applied to

men and women continues to be effective because it is seen to correspond to biology accurately and fairly. The model has credibility because the sexual subordination of women to men is seen to be in

the nature of things and a logical premise of social organization— a

biological reality that is properly reiterated in social institutions,

civil prerogatives, and sex-segregated obligations. The model is

perceived as fair because in it men and women are kept biologically

separate (discrete), socially separate (discrete), and they are declared equal because each is doing equally what is appropriate to

their sex. Separation is seen to be the only real vehicle of equality

for women. The notion is that women competing with men, not

limited to a female sphere, could never achieve social or economic

or sexual equality because of their nature—which in all of these

areas would simply be inferior to male nature; females are inferior,

however, only because they have left the female sphere, which in

itself is equal, not inferior; females are only inferior to men in a

male sphere, where they do not belong. Equality is guaranteed by

setting up separate spheres according to sex and simply insisting

that the spheres are equal. This amounts to a kind of metaphysical

paternalism: constructing a social model in which women need not

experience their inferiority as a burden but instead are assigned

such social value as women that their inferiority is of equal social

worth to the superiority of men. The separate spheres are declared

equal with no reference to the material conditions of the persons in

the spheres and this is the sense in which women have equality

with men under this model. There need not be equality of rights,

for instance; indeed, it is counterindicated. Since the sexes are not

the same, they should not be treated the same, and something is

wrong when a common standard is applied to both. In this social

model, separation by sex class is viewed as the only basis for equality; sex segregation is the institutional expression of this egalitarian ethic, its program in fact. With sex as with race, separation is a

fact; equality is a chimera or a lie.

The woman-superior model of antifeminism is found in two apparently opposing realms: the spiritual and the sexual. In the spiritual realm, the woman is superior to the male by definition; he worships her because she is good; her sex makes her moral or gives

her the responsibility for a morality that is sex-specific. Being

female, she is higher, by nature closer to some abstract conception

of good. She is credited with a moral sensibility that men are hard

put to match (but then, they are not expected to try): she is ethereal, she floats, her moral nature lifts her up, she gravitates toward

that which is pure, chaste, and tasteful. She has an instinctive, sex-

based knowledge of what is good and right. Her moral sensibility

is unfailingly benign, always an influence toward the good. Her

sex-class business includes the business of being virtuous— a

strange assignment by sex, since the Latin root of the word v irtu e

means “strength” or “m anliness, ” which perhaps shows the futility

of the project for her. T his goodness of her sex is essentially based

on a presumed chastity, a necessary chastity— of behavior but also

of appetite. She, as a woman, is not supposed to know sexual desire. Men lust. As one who by her nature does not lust, she is the opposite of man: he is carnal; she is good. There is no notion of

female m orality or of a woman’s being good in the world that is not

based largely on chastity as a moral value. The great female tragedies are stories of sexual falls. The tragic flaw in a female hero—

H ardy’s Tess or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina— is sexual desire. All

the drama of a female life, in great or in banal works, basically

replicates the biblical fall. Seduction (or rape) means knowledge,

which is sexual desire; sexual desire means descent into sin and

inevitable punishment. As a cultural symbol, the good female is

innocent: innocent of sex, innocent of knowledge— chaste in both

ways. H istorically, ignorance has been a form of grace for the good

woman; education was denied women to keep them morally good.

The elevation of a woman requires that she have this innocence,

this purity, this chastity: she must not know the world, which men

embody. The worship of a woman or a female religious symbol is

often the unmediated worship of chastity. The virgin is the great

religious symbol of female good, the female who is by nature (in

her body) good, who embodies the good. The awe and honor accorded the chaste female by men are frequently pointed to to show that men do not hate or degrade women, that men worship, adore,

and admire women. The m orally superior nature of women is honored mostly in the abstract, and women are worshiped mostly in the abstract. The worship is worship of a sym bol— a symbol ma­

nipulated to justify the uses to which fallen women are put. The

morally good woman is put on a pedestal—a small, precarious,

raised stage, often mined, on which she stands for as long as she

can—until she falls off or jumps or it goes boom.

In the secular world, women are also credited with having a

sense of good that is intrinsically female, a sense of good that men

do not have. This is a frequent feature of contemporary environmentalist or antimilitarist movements. Women are seen to have an inborn commitment to both clean air and peace, a moral nature

that abhors pollution and murder. Being good or moral is viewed

as a particular biological capacity of women and as a result women

are the natural guardians of morality: a moral vanguard as it were.

Organizers use this appeal to women all the time. Motherhood is

especially invoked as biological proof that women have a special

relationship to life, a special sensitivity to its meaning, a special,

intuitive knowledge of what is right. Any political group can appropriate the special moral sensibility of women to its own ends: most groups do, usually in place of offering substantive relief to

women with respect to sexism in the group itself. Women all along

the male-defined political spectrum give special credence to this

view of a female biological nature that is morally good.

However this premise about a biologically based morality is

used, the woman-superior model of antifeminism is operating to

keep women down, not up, in the crude world of actual human

interchange. To stay worshiped, the woman must stay a symbol

and she must stay good. She cannot become merely a human in the

muck of life, morally flawed and morally struggling, committing

acts that have complex, difficult, unpredictable consequences. She

must not walk the same streets men do or do the same things or

have the same responsibilities. Precisely because she is good, she

is unfit to do the same things, unfit to make the same decisions, unfit to resolve the same dilemmas, unfit to undertake the same responsibilities, unfit to exercise the same rights. Her nature is

different— this time better but still absolutely different— and

therefore her role must be different. The worshiping attitude, the

spiritual elevation of women that men invoke whenever they suggest that women are finer than they, proposes that women are what men can never be: chaste, good. In fact men are what women can

never be: real moral agents, the bearers of real moral authority and

responsibility. Women are not kept from this moral agency by biology, but by a male social system that puts women above or below simple human choice in m orally demanding situations. The spiritual superiority of women in this model of ludicrous homage

isolates women from the human acts that create meaning, the human choices that create both ethics and history. It separates women out from the chaos and triumph of human responsibility by

giving women a two-dimensional m orality, a stagnant m orality,

one in which what is right and good is predetermined, sex-deter-

mined, biologically determined. The worship of women, devotion

to that in woman which raises man, respect for some moral sensibility allegedly inborn only in women, is the seductive antifeminism, the one that entrances women who have seen through the other kinds. Being worshiped (for most women) is preferable to

being defiled, and being looked up to is better than being walked

on. It is hard for women to refuse the worship of what otherwise is

despised: being female. Woman’s special moral nature has sometimes been used to plead her case: being moral, she w ill be able to upgrade the m orality of the nation if she has the rights of citizenship, the tone of the marketplace if she is employed, the quality of the church if she officiates, the humanism of government if she is

in it; being moral, she w ill be on the side of good. It has also been

argued, more loudly and more often, that her moral nature must

not be contaminated by vulgar responsibilities; that she has a special moral role to play in making the nation and the world good—

she must be in her person the example of good that w ill civilize and

educate men and make the nation moral. One cannot do what men

do—not in government, not in the family, not even in religion, not

anywhere—and be an example of good. “It is the task of the Positive Woman, ” wrote Phyllis Schlafly, “to keep America good. ” 1

Women keep Amerika good by being good. Many women who

hate Schlafly’s politics would agree that women have a special

moral responsibility “to keep America good. ” They have a different political program of good in mind and a different conception of women’s rights, but their conception of a biologically determined morality in which women are better than men is not different. Antifeminism allows for this sentimentality, encourages and exploits this self-indulgence; liberation does not. As Frederick

Douglass wrote over a century ago: “We advocate women’s rights,

not because she is an angel, but because she is a woman, having the

same wants, and being exposed to the same evils as man. ” 2

The woman-superior model of antifeminism also takes a sexual

form, one that is purely pornographic. The central conceit of

woman-hating sex, sex as conquest and possession, dominance and

submission, is that the woman has real power: she is only the apparent victim; she is only seemingly powerless. Her power is in her capacity to provoke erection or lust. Men suffer arousal passively—

against their will or regardless of their will. They then act on what

a woman, or any sex object, has provoked. She provokes what she

wants. When a man has an erection and commits a sexual act because of it or in response to it, he is acting in response to a provocation by a woman, whose nature and intent are well met by his act.

In pornography, the male sexual values that inform and permeate

rape and other forced sex acts are articulated without apology. The

genre insists that sex is conquest, that the woman who resists

wants to be forced, hurt, brutalized; that the woman who wants

sex gets pleasure from being used like a thing, from pain and humiliation. The genre insists that rape, battery, physical torture, bondage, capture, and imprisonment are things done to women

because women provoke them the same way that women provoke

erection: by being there, by being female. Provoking these acts is

the power women have over men; women get men to do these

things, to perform these sex acts. In the world men seem to exercise power, but all of that comes to nothing in the face of the lust provoked by a woman. W hatever he does to her, she is still more

powerful than he is because he wants her, he needs her, he is being

driven by a desire for her. In the sexual woman-superior model,

power is articulated as being intrinsically female because power is

redefined beyond reason, beyond coherence: as if power is in the

corpse that draws the vultures. This pornographic conception of

female power is fundamental to the antifeminism of sexual-libera-

tion movements in which unlim ited sexual use of women by men is

defined as freedom for both: she wants it; he responds; vo ili! the

revolution. It is also fundamental to the antifeminism of the legal

system with respect to sexual crimes like rape, battery, and sexual

abuse of children, especially girls. The female is still seen as the

provocation for what might be a legitimate sex act, depending on

just how provocative she was. Her w ill is regarded as probably

implicit in the use the male made of her. The female is seen to have

power over the man— and responsibility for what he has done to

her— because he wanted her so bad: she has provoked whatever

desire motivated him to act. His desire is what gives her power.

Her power is in her sexual nature, her existence as a woman to

which he responds— not in her behavior. For this reason, rape inquiries search her behavior to find the truth about her nature. If her nature is finally seen to warrant his act, he is not responsible

for it— she is. T his is the power of women in pornographic sex.

The apologies for this sexual system that claim that women are

powerful because women are desired— in fact, that go so far as to

insist that women are sex-dominant and sex-controlling— uphold

this phantasmagoric female power, keeping women in real life

powerless. T he antifeminism is directly implicit in the pornographic conceptions of female power, female nature, and female

freedom. Her power is in being used, her nature is to be used, and

her freedom is in being used. Or, her power is in provoking men to

hurt her, her nature is to provoke men to hurt her, and her freedom is in provoking pain. Or, her power is in making men force her to do what she does not want to do, her nature is to make men

force her to do what she does not want to do, and her freedom is in

being forced to do what she does not want to do. These principles

of antifeminism effectively confound both power and freedom: the

response in most women is to want neither. A woman’s individual

nature is more than confounded: it is frequently annihilated.

The male-dominant model of antifeminism is virtually everywhere. Its woman-hating dimensions have been discussed brilliantly in many feminist texts; here the focus will be on how it functions to stop a liberation movement. Religion and biology are

the great roots of the metaphysical idea that men are superior to

women because they are. Whether male dominance is described as

a kind of perpetual biological pillaging or the will of a merely

wrathful God, the hostility in male dominance is what is most consistently justified by the idea of male dominance. Keeping women a subject people is hostile. The genius of the male-dominant model

of antifeminism is the transmogrification of this hostility into what

passes for love. When one group conquers another, the act of conquest is clearly hostile; when a man conquers a woman, it is to express romantic or sexual love. Invasion is an act of hostility, unless the male is invading the female, in which case “violation” is used to mean love. Beating someone up is an act of hostility, unless

a man is beating a woman whom he loves: women, it is said, consider beating proof of love and demand or provoke this proof.

When a man tyrannizes a people, he is hostile to their rights and

freedom; when a man tyrannizes a woman, he is well within the

bounds of his role as husband or lover. When a group deemed

inferior is targeted for violence in propaganda, that propaganda is

unarguably hostile; when men target women for sexual violence in

pornography, the m aterial, the targeting, and the violence are considered expressions of sexual love. Mass terrorization of one group by another is hostile, unless women are terrorized by men raping,

in which case each rape must be examined for signs of love. Confining a group, restricting them, depriving them of rights because they were born into one class and not another are hostile acts, unless women are being confined, restricted, and deprived of rights by the men who love them so that they w ill be what men can love.

There is hostility in the world, which one recognizes as historical

and social cruelty; and then there is the love of man for woman.

The acts m ay be the same but they are so very different, because

what is done to women is measured by an absolutely unique standard: is it sexy? Women are taken to be sex, so if it— whatever it is— is done to a woman, it is likely to be sexy. If it is sexy, it

comes under the aegis of love. H ostility is defined in the dictionary

as “antagonism . ” Love is seen to be a grand antagonism; so is a

great sexual passion, while the everyday fucks are little antagonisms oft repeated. T he torturer is just a real obsessed lover when the victim is a woman, especially a woman whom he knows intim ately. Rape is just another kind of love; and nothing— no law, no political movement, no higher consciousness— has yet made rape

less sexy for those who see love in male dominance. Chains are

sexy when women wear them, prisons are sexy when women are in

them, pain is sexy when women hurt, and love includes all this and

more. Beat up a man for speaking his mind and there is a human-

rights violation— hunt him or capture him or terrorize him and his

human rights have been violated; do the same to a woman and the

violation is sexy. Nothing that falls within the purview of the love

of man for woman qualifies as a violation of human rights; instead,

violation becomes a synonym for sex, part of the vocabulary of

love. The love of the superior for the inferior must by its nature be

fairly horrific, fairly terrifying, grossly distorted. When men love

women, every hostile act demonstrates that love, every brutality is

a sign of it; and every complaint that a woman makes against the

hostility of male dominance is taken to be a complaint against love,

a refusal to be a real woman, that is, to suffer male hostility as an

ecstasy, to suffer love.

The male-dominant model of antifeminism also proposes that

freedom is inimical to the situation of women because women must

always bargain. Since men are dominant, aggressive, controlling,

powerful because of God or nature, the weak women must always

have something to trade to get the protection of these strong men.

Either the woman is too weak to care for herself or she is too weak

to fend off men; in either case, she needs a male protector. If she

needs a male protector, she must not only bargain to get him; she

must continuously bargain to keep him or to keep him from abusing the power he has over her. This compromises any possibility of self-determination for her. The dependence of women on men, the

inability of women to have and to manifest a self-sustaining and

self-determined integrity, and the fundamental definition of a

woman as a whore by nature are all established as being implicit in

the biological relationship between men and women: implicit and

unalterable. This feature of the male-dominant model is unique to

it. Neither the separate-but-equal model nor the woman-superior

model puts women in a metaphysically defined, biologically determined relationship of prostitution to men. (Perhaps this virtue of the male-dominant model accounts for its ubiquity. ) The bargain

women must make because men are biologically dominant is

pointed to whenever a woman achieves. The bargain is searched

for—what did she sell to whom to enable her to do whatever she

did? The necessity for bargaining is used to stop rebellion. The

bargain necessitated by his greater aggression, strength, and power

is the principal reason for refuting the possibility of her claim to

independence in this model of antifeminism. He is dominant; she

must submit. Submission in the face of greater strength, greater

aggression, greater power, is unavoidable. She is simply not strong

enough to be on her own— especially not if he wants her because

she is not strong enough or aggressive enough to stop him from

taking her. So each woman has to make a deal with at least one of

the strong ones for protection; and the deal she makes, being based

on her inferiority, originating in it, acknowledges the truth and

inevitability of that inferiority. In needing to bargain because she is

too weak not to, she proves that antifeminism— the repudiation of

her freedom— is grounded in simple biological necessity, biological

common sense, biological realism.

Because the male is presumed dominant by natural right or divine w ill, he is supposed to have an exclusive authority in the realm of public power. The antifeminism predicated on natural

male dominance also maintains that men naturally dominate government, politics, economics, culture, state and m ilitary policy—

that men naturally assert their dominance by running all social and

political institutions. The token woman here and there in no w ay

interferes w ith the effectiveness of virtually all-male clubs of power

in erasing any hope of real authority or influence for women. One

woman on the Supreme Court, one woman in the Senate, a woman

prime minister, an occasional woman head of state, are not so

much role models as rebukes to economically demoralized women

who are supposed to accept the tokens as what they too could have

been if only they themselves had been different— better, smarter,

richer, prettier, not such schlemiels. Token women must go out of

their w ay not to offend the male sense of fem ininity, but by their

visibility they inevitably do so. As a result, the token women give

out the correct line on fem ininity and at the same time bear the

brunt of the critical perception that obviously they are not at home

being fucked. T he woman who is not a token is mostly condescended to by the token, a condescension that she feels not only acutely but often, since the token is always pointed out to her as

proof that her own situation does not result from an exclusionary

social system . Every all-male or nearly all-male group— profession,

institution, business, club, or power clique—is a concrete embodiment of antifeminism. By its existence it upholds and proclaims the dominance of men over women. By its existence it reinforces the

social inferiority of women to men, perpetuates the political subordination of women to men, mandates the economic dependence of women on men, and endlessly revitalizes the sexual submission of

women to men. The all-male clique of power communicates the

antifeminism of male dominance everywhere it operates, all the

time, without exception. The power of men to make decisions and

determine policy, to create culture and to control the institutions of

culture, is simultaneously held to be the logical outcome of male

dominance and proof of its existence. Every institution that is

structurally male-dominant is also ideologically male-dominant; or

its structure would change. Every group that is structurally male-

dominant functions as concrete resistance, material resistance, to

the liberation of women: it prohibits the exodus of women from the

obligations and disadvantages, not to mention the cruelties, of inferiority. Any area that is virtually all male is hostile to women, to political rights, economic parity, and sexual self-determination

for women. The verbal support of men in all-male institutions,

groups, or cliques of power for mild feminist reform has no value

in the world of real, substantive change for women: it is the allmale structure itself that must be subverted and destroyed. Male dominance and the antifeminism that defends it can only be repudiated by being ended; those who construct it by literally being the bricks of which it is built cannot change it by merely disputing

it. The antifeminism in exclusively male enclaves is not made humane through gestures; it is immune to modification through diplomatic goodwill. As long as a road is closed to women, it is closed to women; and that means that women cannot take that road, however nicely the men on it suggest they would not mind. The road is not only a road to power or independence or equity; it is often the

only road away from tremendous abuse. The antifeminism in an

all-male institution cannot be mitigated by attitude; nor can male

dominance— alw ays the meaning of an all-male enclave— ever accept that women are not inferior to men. The token woman carries the stigma of inferiority with her, however much she tries to dissociate herself from the other women of her sex class. In trying to stay singular, not one of them, she grants the inferiority of her sex

class, an inferiority for which she is always compensating and from

which she is never free. If the inferiority were not reckoned universally true, she of all women would not have to defend herself against the stigma of it; nor would her own com plicity in the antifeminism of the institution (through dissociation with lesser women) be a perpetual condition of her quasi acceptance. Male

dominance in society alw ays means that out of public sight, in the

private, ahistorical world of men with women, men are sexually

dominating women. The antifeminism in the all-male rulership of

society alw ays means that in the intimate world of men with

women, men are politically suppressing women.

The three social models of antifeminism— the separate-but-equal

model, the woman-superior model, and the male-dominant model

—are not inimical to one another. T hey mix and match with perfect ease, since logic and consistency are not prerequisites for keeping women down: no one need prove his case to justify the subordination of women; no one need meet a rigorous standard of

intellectual, political, or moral accountability. Most people, whatever their political convictions, seem to believe parts of each model, the pieces adding up to a whole view. Fragmented philosophical

and ideological justifications for the subordination of women exist

in a material context in which women are subordinated to men: the

subordination is self-justifying, since power subordinates and

power justifies; power both serves and consoles itself. Separate-

but-equal, woman-superior, and male-dominant antifeminism can

even be used sequentially as one whole argument for the practice of

male supremacy: men and women have different capacities and dif­

ferent areas of responsibility according to sex but their functions

and attributes are of equal importance; women are morally superior

to men (a different capacity, a different area of responsibility), except when they provoke lust, in which case they have real power over men; the biological dominance of men over women is (a) counterbalanced by the real sexual power of women over men (in which case each has separate-but-equal powers) or (b) proved in that

women are too good to be as aggressive and as rudely dominant as

men or (c) naturally fair and naturally reasonable because natural

submission is the natural complement to natural dominance (and

dominance and submission are separate-but-equal spheres, submission marking the woman as morally superior unless the submission is sexually provocative, in which case her sex gives her different-but-equal power). Either this is true or it is not. Either the arguments of antifeminism, one by one or the whole lot, are true or they are not. Either there are separate-but-equal spheres or there

are not. Either women are morally better than men or they are not.

Either women have sexual power over men simply by being

women or they do not; either provoking lust is power t)r it is not.

Either men are dominant by nature or will of God or they are not.

Antifeminism says all this is true; feminism says it is not. The so-

called feminism that says some of it is true and some of it is not

cannot combat antifeminism because it has incorporated it. Antifeminism proposes two standards for rights and responsibilities: two standards determined strictly by and applied strictly to sex.

Feminism as the liberation movement of women proposes one absolute standard of human dignity, indivisible by sex. In this sense, feminism does propose—as antifeminists accuse—that men and

women be treated the same. Feminism is a radical stance against

double standards in rights and responsibilities, and feminism is a

revolutionary advocacy of a single standard of human freedom.

To achieve a single standard of human freedom and one absolute

standard of human dignity, the sex-class system has to be dismem­

bered. T he reason is pragmatic, not philosophical: nothing less w ill

work. However much everyone wants to do less, less w ill not free

women. Liberal men and women ask, W hy can’t we just be ourselves, all human beings, begin now and not dwell in past injustices, wouldn’t that subvert the sex-class system , change it from the inside out? T he answer is no. The sex-class system has a structure; it has deep roots in religion and culture; it is fundamental to the economy; sexuality is its creature; to be “just human beings” in

it, women have to hide what happens to them as women because

they are women— happenings like forced sex and forced reproduction, happenings that continue as long as the sex-class system operates. T he liberation of women requires facing the real condition of women in order to change it. “W e’re all just people” is a stance that

prohibits recognition of the systematic cruelties visited on women

because of sex oppression.

Feminism as a liberation movement, then, demands a revolutionary single standard of what humans have a right to, and also demands that the current sexual bifurcation of rights never be let out of sight. Antifeminism does the opposite: it insists that there is a

double standard of what humans have a right to— a male standard

and a female standard; and it insists at the same time that we are all

just human beings, right now, as things stand, within this sex-class

system, so that no special attention should be paid to social phenomena on account of sex. W ith respect to rape, for instance, the feminist starts out with a single standard of freedom and dignity:

everyone, women as well as men, should have a right to the integrity of their own body. Feminists then focus on and analyze the sex-class reality of rape: men rape, women are raped; even in those

statistically rare cases where boys or men are raped, men are the

rapists. Antifeminists start out with a double standard: men conquer, possess, dominate, men take women; women are conquered, possessed, dominated, and taken. Antifeminists then insist that

rape is a crime like any other, like mugging or homicide or bur­

glary: they deny its sex-specific, sex-class nature and the political

meaning undeniably implicit in the sexual construction of the

crime. Feminists are accused of denying the common humanity of

men and women because feminists refuse to fudge on the sex issue

of who does what to whom, how often, and why. Antifeminists

refuse to acknowledge that the sex-class system repudiates the

humanity of women by keeping women systematically subject to

exploitation and violence as a condition of sex. In analyzing the

sex-class system, feminists are accused of inventing or perpetuating

it. Calling attention to it, we are told, insults women by suggesting

that they are victims (stupid enough to allow themselves to be victimized). Feminists are accused of being the agents of degradation by postulating that such degradation exists. This is a little like considering abolitionists responsible for slavery, but all is fair when love is war. In ignoring the political significance of the sex-class

system except to defend it when it is under attack, antifeminists

suggest that “we’re all in this together, ” all us human beings, dif-

ferent-but-together, a formulation that depends on lack of clarity

for its persuasiveness. Indisputably, we’re all in rape together,

some of us to great disadvantage. Feminism especially requires a

rigorous analysis of sex class, one that is ongoing, stubborn, persistent, unsentimental, disciplined, not placated by fatuous invocations of a common humanity that in fact the sex-class system itself suppresses. The sex-class system cannot be undone when those

whom it exploits and humiliates are unable to face it for what it is,

for what it takes from them, for what it does to them. Feminism

requires precisely what misogyny destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power. Despite the impossibility of it, there is such bravery: there are such women, in some periods

millions upon millions of them. If male supremacy survives every

effort of women to overthrow it, it will not be because of biology

or God; nor will it be because of the force and power of men per

se. It will be because the will to liberation was contaminated, un­

dermined, rendered ineffectual and meaningless, by antifeminism:

by specious concepts of equality based on an evasion of what the

sex-class system really is. The refusal to recognize the intrinsic despotism of the sex-class system means that that despotism is inevitably incorporated into reform models of that same system: in this, antifeminism triumphs over the w ill to liberation. The refusal to

recognize the unique abuses inherent in sex labor (treating sex labor as if it were sex-neutral, as if it were not intrinsically part of sex oppression and inseparable from it) is a function of antifeminism; the acceptance of sex labor as appropriate labor for women marks the trium ph of antifeminism over the w ill to liberation. The

sentimental acceptance of a double standard of human rights, responsibilities, and freedom is also the triumph of antifeminism over the w ill to liberation; no sexual dichotomy is compatible with real

liberation. And, most important, the refusal to demand (with no

compromise being possible) one absolute standard of human dignity is the greatest trium ph of antifeminism over the w ill to liberation. W ithout that one absolute standard, liberation is mush; feminism is frivolous and utterly self-indulgent. Without that one

absolute standard as the keystone of revolutionary justice, feminism has no claim to being a liberation movement; it has no revolutionary stance, goal, or potential; it has no basis for a radical reconstruction of society; it has no criteria for action or organization; it has no moral necessity; it has no inescapable claim on the conscience of “mankind”; it has no philosophical seriousness; it has

no authentic stature as a human-rights movement; it has nothing to

teach. Also, without that one absolute standard, feminism has no

chance whatsoever of actually liberating women or destroying the

sex-class system . Refusing to base itself on a principle of universal

human dignity, or compromising, retreating from that principle,

feminism becomes that which exists to stop it: antifeminism. No

liberation movement can accept the degradation of those whom it

seeks to liberate by accepting a different definition of dignity for

them and stay a movement for their freedom at the same time.

(Apologists for pornography: take note. ) A universal standard of

human dignity is the only principle that completely repudiates sex-

class exploitation and also propels all of us into a future where the

fundamental political question is the quality of life for all human

beings. Are women being subordinated to men? There is insufficient dignity in that. Are men being prostituted too? What is human dignity?

Two elements constitute the discipline of feminism: political,

ideological, and strategic confrontation with the sex-class system—

with sex hierarchy and sex segregation—and a single standard of

human dignity. Abandon either element and the sex-class system is

unbreachable, indestructible; feminism loses its rigor, the toughness of its visionary heart; women get swallowed up not only by misogyny but also by antifeminism—facile excuses for exploiting women, metaphysical justifications for abusing women, and shoddy apologies for ignoring the political imperatives of women.

One other discipline is essential both to the practice of feminism

and to its theoretical integrity: the firm, unsentimental, continuous

recognition that women are a class having a common condition.

This is not some psychological process of identification with

women because women are wonderful; nor is it the insupportable

assertion that there are no substantive, treacherous differences

among women. This is not a liberal mandate to ignore what is

cruel, despicable, or stupid in women, nor is it a mandate to ignore

dangerous political ideas or allegiances of women. This does not

mean women first, women best, women only. It does mean that

the fate of every individual woman—no matter what her politics,

character, values, qualities—is tied to the fate of all women

whether she likes it or not. On one level, it means that every

woman’s fate is tied to the fate of women she dislikes personally.

On another level, it means that every woman’s fate is tied to the

fate of women whom she politically and morally abhors. For in-

stance, it means that rape jeopardizes communist and fascist

women, liberal, conservative, Democratic, or Republican women,

racist women and black women, Nazi women and Jew ish women,

homophobic women and homosexual women. The crimes committed against women because they are women articulate the condition of women. T he eradication of these crimes, the transformation of the condition of women, is the purpose of feminism: which means that feminism requires a most rigorous definition of

what those crimes are so as to determine what that condition is.

This definition cannot be compromised by a selective representation of the sex class based on sentim entality or wishful thinking.

This definition cannot exclude prudes or sluts or dykes or mothers

or virgins because one does not want to be associated w ith them.

To be a feminist means recognizing that one is associated with all

women not as an act of choice but as a matter of fact. The sex-class

system creates the fact. When that system is broken, there w ill

be no such fact. Feminists do not create this common condition

by making alliances: feminists recognize this common condition

because it exists as an intrinsic part of sex oppression. The fundamental knowledge that women are a class having a common condition— that the fate of one woman is tied substantively to the fate of all women— toughens feminist theory and practice. That fundamental knowledge is an almost unbearable test of seriousness.

There is no real feminism that does not have at its heart the tempering discipline of sex-class consciousness: knowing that women share a common condition as a class, like it or not.

W hat is that common condition? Subordinate to men, sexually

colonized in a sexual system of dominance and submission, denied

rights on the basis of sex, historically chattel, generally considered

biologically inferior, confined to sex and reproduction: this is the

general description of the social environment in which all women

live. But what is the real map of that environment? Which crimes

create the topography? Drawing 1 shows the basic condition of

E CONOMI C

R A P E

EXPLOI TATI ON

P R O S TI TU T I O N

DRAWING 1. THE CONDITION OF WOMEN

women, a lateral view of the female bottom of sex hierarchy. Rape,

battery, economic exploitation, and reproductive exploitation are

the basic crimes committed against women in the sex-class system

in which they are devalued because they are women. The crimes

are points on a circle because it is a closed system , from nowhere to

nowhere. These specific crimes are each committed against huge

percentages of the female population at any given time. Rape, for

instance, consists not only of police-blotter rape but also marital

rape, incestuous abuse of girls, any sex that is coerced. Battery is

estimated to have happened to 50 percent of married women in the

United States alone. All housewives are economically exploited; all

working women are. Reproductive exploitation includes forced

pregnancy and forced sterilization. There are few female lives not

touched by one, two, or three of these crimes and significantly

determined by all of them. At the heart of the female condition is

pornography: it is the ideology that is the source of all the rest; it

truly defines what women are in this system — and how women are

treated issues from what women are. Pornography is not a metaphor for what women are; it is what women are in theory and in practice. Prostitution is the outer w all, sym bolically the mirror reflection of the pornography, metaphorically built out of brick, concrete, stone, to keep women in—in the sex class. Prostitution is the all-encompassing condition, the body trapped in barter, the body

imprisoned as commodity. W ith respect to the circle of crim es—

rape, battery, reproductive exploitation, economic exploitation—

the crimes can be placed anywhere in the circle in any order. T hey

are the crimes of the sex-class system against women; they are the

crimes that keep women women in an immovable system of sex

hierarchy. T hey are crimes committed against women as women.

Economic exploitation is a specific of women’s condition; it is not a

sex-neutral political category into which the experience of women

sometimes falls. Women are segregated in job ghettos as women;

the lower pay of women is systematic; the sale of sex is a funda­

mental dimension of economic exploitation, whether in prostitution, marriage, or in the marketplace; when women move in large numbers into high-status jobs (male jobs), the jobs lose status (become female jobs); doing the same or comparable jobs as men, women get paid less. Economic exploitation is a key crime against

women but it is not the same economic exploitation that men experience. The construction of causality among the crimes or even the establishment of sequentiality (in which order the crimes appeared

in history or prehistory) is ultimately irrelevant. It does not matter

whether rape came first and caused the systematic economic degradation of women, or whether economic exploitation created conditions in which the production of children got the value it now has, or whether men batter because of jealousy over women’s reproductive capacity, or whether the etiology of rape is in the superior physical strength of men to women discovered in acts of battery

that later became sanctioned and systematic. One can follow the

circle around in either direction (see drawing 2) and construct marvelous theories of causality or sequentiality, most of which are plausible and interesting; and one can try to prioritize the political

importance of the crimes. But what must matter now is the condition of women now: these crimes are now its features, its characteristic events, its experiential absolutes, its inescapable attacks on women as women. These crimes are real, systematic, and define

the condition of women. The relationships between them do not

matter so much as the fact that they are facts: equal, essential,

basic facts. Seen in this light, prohibition against lesbianism, for

instance, is not the same kind of equal, essential, basic fact, nor is

lesbianism an obvious or sure road to freedom. Lesbianism is a

transgression of rules, an affront; but its prohibition is not a basic

constituent part of sex oppression and its expression does not substantively breach or transform sex oppression. There is no state of being or act of w ill, including lesbianism, that changes the circle:

there is no state of being or act of will that protects a woman from

D R A WI NG 2. THE C I R C L E OF

C R I M E S A G A I N S T WOME N

the basic crimes against women as women or puts any woman outside the possibility of suffering these crimes. Great wealth does not put a woman outside the circle of crimes; neither does racial supremacy in a racist social system or a good job or a terrific heterosexual relationship with a wonderful man or the most liberated (by any standard) sex life or living with women in a commune in a

pasture. The circle of crimes is also not changed by how one feels

about it. One can decide to ignore it or one can decide it does not

apply for any number of reasons, emotional, intellectual, or practical: nevertheless it is there and it applies.

Going back to the whole model—the circle, the pornography at

the center of it, the all-encompassing wall of prostitution that circumscribes it—it does not matter whether prostitution is perceived as the surface condition, with pornography hidden in the deepest

recesses of the psyche; or whether pornography is perceived as the

surface condition, with prostitution being its wider, more important, hidden base, the largely unacknowledged sexual-economic necessity of women. (See drawings 3 and 4. ) Each has to be understood as intrinsically part of the condition of women—pornography being what women are, prostitution being what women do, the circle of crimes being what women are for. Rape, battery, economic exploitation, and reproductive exploitation require pornography as female metaphysics so as to be virtually self-justifying, virtually invisible abuses; and they also require the wall of prostitution confining women (meaning that whatever women do is within the bounds of prostitution) so that women are always and absolutely accessible. The heart of pornography and the wall of prostitution mirror each other in that both are meant to mean—and concretely do mean in the male system—that women deserve the

crimes that define their condition, that those crimes are responses

to what women are and what women do, that the crimes committed against women define the condition of women correctly— in accordance with what women are and what women do.

T he meaning of this description of what women’s subordination

is, how women are kept subordinate, how that subordination is

acted out on women system atically, is simple for feminists: breaking the circle up, breaking down the w all, annihilating the system ’s heart, are what we must do. The meaning for antifeminists is also

simple: whatever strengthens or vitalizes any aspect of the model is

of great practical value in keeping women subordinate. Antifeminists can disagree strategically (for instance, on whether pornography should be public or private) without disagreeing in principle on what is necessary to keep women encapsulated in subjection (the

use of pornography, its cultural and psychic centrality whether it is

public or private, the use of women as pornography in public and

in private). But one cannot be a feminist and support any element

in this model: there are no exceptions— not civil liberties lawyers

or liberals or sym pathetic men or so-called feminists who indulge

in using the label but evading the substance. Antifeminist politics

come in many guises, but a vivid memory of what the condition of

women is— w hat crimes articulate it, what is at its heart, what is

the impenetrable boundary beyond which women do not pass—

provides a standard for discerning antifeminism in any political

stance. No one can defend or give aid and comfort to that which

keeps women subordinate and at the same time claim to be acting

in behalf of women’s liberation: feminism is not a lifestyle or an

attitude or a feeling of vague sym pathy with women or an assertion

of modernity. Antifeminism saturates the political spectrum from

Right to Left, liberal to conservative, reactionary to progressive.

Antifeminism is resistance to the liberation of women from the sex-

class system , that resistance expressed in constructing political defenses of the constituent parts of sex oppression. This antifeminism is a vital part of programs, values, ideologies, philosophies, arguments, actions, economic, sexual, and social manipulations that are the substance of most political discourse and organizing. Antifeminism is a potent expression of reaction, backlash, and suppression;

DRAWING 3. PROSTITUTION AS

THE MATERIAL REALITY;

PORNOGRAPHY AS

THE UNDERLYING IDEOLOGY

THE C I R C L E OF C R I M E S A G A I N S T WO M E N

P R O S T I T U T I O N

DRAWING 4. PORNOGRAPHY AS

THE SURFACE PHENOMENON:

PROSTITUTION AS

THE UNDERLYING SYSTEM

it is protean; it is easy, popular, and always fashionable in one

form or another.

Antifeminism is also operating whenever any political group is

ready to sacrifice one group of women, one faction, some women,

some kinds of women, to any element of sex-class oppression: to

pornography, to rape, to battery, to economic exploitation, to reproductive exploitation, to prostitution. There are women all along the male-defined political spectrum, including on both extreme

ends of it, ready to sacrifice some women, usually not themselves,

to the brothels or to the farms. The sacrifice is profoundly antifeminist; it is also profoundly immoral. Men mostly accept the disposition of women under the sex-class system and they mostly accept the crimes committed against women: but sometimes the

status of women is addressed, those crimes are addressed, in political discourse. Whenever some women are doctrinally delivered to sex exploitation, the political stance is corrupt. Virtually all ideologies are implicitly antifeminist in that women are sacrificed to higher goals: the higher goal of reproduction; the higher goal of

pleasure; the higher goal of a freedom antipathetic to the freedom

of women; the higher goal of better conditions for workers not

women; the higher goal of a new order that keeps the sex exploitation of women essentially intact; the higher goal of an old order that considers the sex exploitation of women a sign of social stability (woman’s in her place, all’s right with the world). Some women are sacrificed to a function—fucking, reproducing, house-cleaning, and so on. A political promise is made, and kept, that

some women will do some things so that all women must not do all

things. Women accept the sacrifice of other women to that which

they find repugnant: a seduction of antifeminism that outdoes worship of female good in getting female adherents because it is more practical. Men all along the political spectrum manipulate this seduction with great skill. Some women are sacrificed by race or class: kept doing some kinds of work that other women will then

not have to do. Supporting the use of some women in any area of

sex exploitation is the w illful sacrifice of women on an altar of sex

abuse and it is a political repudiation of the sex-class consciousness

basic to feminism: it is— whoever does it— antifeminism. And then

there is the psychological use of the same reactionary strategy: some

women, of course, like being. . . (beaten, raped, exploited, bought

and sold, forced to have sex, forced to have children). Antifem inism is also a form of psychological warfare, and of course some women do like. . . Women intend to save themselves when sacrificing some women, but only the freedom of all women protects any woman. T his is practical and true because of the nature of sex

oppression. Men, who use power against women in sex exploitation, know that it is practical and true: which is w hy it is a fundamental strategy of antifeminism to encourage the sacrifice of some women by a ll women.

*

Now look at the world as right-wing women see it. T hey live in

the same world as all women: a world of sex segregation and sex

hierarchy; a world defined by the crimes of rape, battery, economic and reproductive exploitation; a world circumscribed by prostitution; a world in which they too are pornography. T hey see

the system of sex oppression— about which they are not stupid—as

closed and unalterable. It is unchangeable to them, whether they

take as their authority God or man. If sex oppression is real, absolute, unchanging, inevitable, then the views of right-wing women are more logical than not. M arriage is supposed to protect them

from rape; being kept at home is supposed to protect them from

the castelike economic exploitation of the marketplace; reproduction gives them what value and respect they have and so they must increase the value of reproduction even if it means increasing their

own vulnerability to reproductive exploitation (especially forced

pregnancy); religious marriage—traditional, correct, law-abiding

marriage—is supposed to protect against battery, since the wife is

supposed to be cherished and respected. The flaws in the logic are

simple: the home is the most dangerous place for a woman to be,

the place she is most likely to be murdered, raped, beaten, certainly the place where she is robbed of the value of her labor. What right-wing women do to survive the sex-class system does not

mean that they will survive it: if they get killed, it will most likely

be at the hands of their husbands; if they get raped, the rapists will

most likely be their husbands or men who are friends or acquaintances; if they get beaten, the batterer will most likely be their husbands—perhaps 25 percent of those who are beaten will be

beaten during pregnancy; if they do not have any money of their

own, they are more vulnerable to abuse from their husbands, less

able to escape, less able to protect their children from incestuous

assault; if abortion becomes illegal, they will still have abortions

and they are likely to die or be maimed in great numbers; * if they

get addicted to drugs, it will most likely be to prescription drugs

prescribed by the family doctor to keep the family intact; if they

get poor—through being abandoned by their husbands or through

old age—they are likely to be discarded, their usefulness being

over. And right-wing women are still pornography (as Marabel

* Before 1973, both abortion and contraception were mostly illegal. Perhaps two thirds of women aborting were married (in one good study 75

percent were married) and most had children, as far as can be discerned

from the scanty evidence. With legal abortion and legal contraception,

about three quarters of the women seem to be single. As many people

suggest, women no longer feel compelled to marry on becoming pregnant,

which accounts in part for the demographic change. But I think that the

availability of contraceptives in conjunction with abortion is mainly responsible for the lower percentage of married women among those aborting. I suspect that married women use contraceptives with more precision

Morgan recognized in The Total Woman) just like other women

whom they despise; and what they do— just like other women— is

barter. T h ey too live inside the wall of prostitution no matter how

they see themselves.

More than anything else, it is antifeminism that convinces right-

wing women that the system of sex segregation and sex hierarchy

is immovable, unbreachable, and inevitable— and therefore that

the logic of their world view is more substantive and compelling

than any analysis, however accurate, of its flaws. It is not the antifeminism of the Right specifically that keeps the allegiance of these women: it is the antifeminism that saturates political discourse all

along the political spectrum, the antifeminism that permeates virtually all political philosophies, programs, and parties. Antifeminism is not a form of political reaction and suppression confined to the far Right. If it were, women would have compelling reason for

moving aw ay from the far Right toward philosophies, programs,

and parties not fundamentally antifeminist; women would also

have good reason to see sex-class oppression as transformable, not

absolute and eternal. It is the pervasiveness of antifeminism, its

ubiquity, that establishes for women that they have no w ay out of

the sex-class system . The antifeminism of Left, Right, and center

fixes the power of the Right over women—gives the huge majority

of women over to the Right— over to social conservatism, ecoand consistency than do single women—certainly than do the teenagers who characteristically do not use contraceptives at all and who skew the

percentages toward single women. If the Human Life Amendment or Statute passes, or any similar legislation, both the intrauterine device and the low-dosage birth control pill will become illegal. They will be considered

abortifacients because they are known to stop the fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall, thereby “killing” it. If effective contraception is once again unavailable—so that both contraception and abortion are inaccessible—I suspect the percentage of married women having abortions will once again skyrocket.