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For Grace Paley

and in Memory o f Emma Goldman

. . . Shakespeare had a sister; but do not

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

poet. She died young —alas, she never

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

this poet who never wrote a word and was

buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives

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

washing up the dishes and putting the

children to bed. But she lives; for great

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

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

your power to give her. For my belief is

that if we live another century or so—I

am talking of the common life which is the

real life and not of the little separate lives

which we live as individuals —and have

five hundred a year each of us and rooms

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

we think; if we escape a little from the

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

other but in relation to reality. . . if we

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

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

that our relation is to the world of reality

. . . then the opportunity will come and the

dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister

will put on the body which she has so often

laid down. Drawing her life from the lives

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

will be born. As for her coming without

that preparation, without that effort on

our part, without that determination that

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

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

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

even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile.

Virginia Woolf,

A Room of One's Own (1929)

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

Ricki Abrams and I began writing this book together in

Amsterdam, Holland, in December 1971. We worked

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

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

the responsibility for finishing it became mine. I thank

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

we had together, and this book which came from that

time and grew beyond it.

Andrea Dworkin

C O N T E N T S

Introduction

Part One: THE FAIRY TALES

Chapter 1 Onceuponatime: The Roles

Chapter 2 Onceuponatime: The Moral of the

Story

Part Two: THE PORNOGRAPHY

5 1

Chapter 3 Woman as Victim: Story of O

Chapter 4 Woman as Victim: The Image

Chapter 5 Woman as Victim: Suck

Part Three: THE HERSTORY

Chapter 6 Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding

Chapter 7 Gynocide: The Witches

118

Part Four: ANDROGYNY

151

Chapter 8 Androgyny: The Mythological Model

155

Chapter 9 Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and

Community

174

Afterword

197

Notes

205

Bibliography

211

There is a misery of the body and a misery

of the mind, and if the stars, whenever we

looked at them, poured nectar into our

mouths, and the grass became bread, we

would still be sad. We live in a system that

manufactures sorrow, spilling it out of its

mill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm,

and we drown down, dead, too soon.

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

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

The Revolution is not an event that takes

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

process in which new people are created,

capable of renovating society so that the

revolution does not replace one elite with

another, but so that the revolution creates

a new anti-authoritarian structure with

anti-authoritarian people who in their

turn re-organize the society so that it

becomes a non-alienated human society,

free from war, hunger, and exploitation.

Rudi Dutschke

March 7, 1968

You do not teach someone to count only

up to eight. You do not say nine and ten

and beyond do not exist. You give people

everything or they are not able to count at

all. There is a real revolution or none at

all.

Pericles Korovessis, in an interview

in Liberation, June 1973

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

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

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

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

their own lives, participate fully in community, live in

dignity and freedom.

T h e commitment to ending male dominance as the

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

the self and transformation o f the social reality on every

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

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

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

two problems, tangential to that analysis, but still crucial

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

Woman Hating

Until the appearance of the brilliant anthology

Sisterhood Is Powerful and Kate Millett’s extraordinary

book Sexual Politics, women did not think o f themselves

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

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

liberation movement in Amerika can be dated from the

appearance of those two books. We learn as we reclaim

our herstory that there was a feminist movement which

organized around the attainment of the vote for

women. We learn that those feminists were also ardent

abolitionists. Women “came out” as abolitionists —out

of the closets, kitchens, and bedrooms; into public

meetings, newspapers, and the streets. Two activist

heroes o f the abolitionist movement were Black women,

Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, and they stand

as prototypal revolutionary models.

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

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

the uses to which it would be put.

Feminism and the struggle for Black liberation were

parts of a compelling whole. That whole was called,

ingenuously perhaps, the struggle for human rights.

The fact is that consciousness, once experienced, cannot

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

Introduction

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

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

Seneca Falls when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia

Mott, both activist abolitionists, called a convention.

T hat convention drafted The Seneca Falls Declaration of

Rights and Sentiments which is to this day an outstanding

feminist declaration.

In struggling for the vote, women developed many

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

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

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

T h e struggle for the vote began officially with the

Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. It was not until

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

kindly male electorate. Women did not imagine that the

vote would scarcely touch on, let alone transform, their

own oppressive situations. Nor did they imagine that

the “separate but equal” doctrine would develop as

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

uses to which it would be put.

T here have also been, always, individual feminists —

women who violated the strictures o f the female role,

who challenged male supremacy, who fought for the

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

bondage o f the marriage contract. Those individuals

were often eloquent when they spoke o f the oppression

they suffered as women in their own lives, but other

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

Woman Haling

Feminists, most often as individuals but sometimes in

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

that they were oppressed.

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

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

aborted in their development by sexist education; how

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

churches conspire to deny us dignity and freedom; how

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

We developed consciousness-raising sessions to try to

fathom the extraordinary extent of our despair, to try

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

was both pain and ecstasy in this process. Women

discovered each other, for truly no oppressed group

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

to gain control over our own lives and over our own

bodies, to develop the concrete ability to survive on our

own terms. Women also began to articulate structural

analyses o f sexist society — Millett did that with Sexual

Politics; in Vaginal Politics Ellen Frankfort demonstrated

Introduction

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

women who rebel against society’s well-defined female

role.

We began to see ourselves clearly, and what we saw

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

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

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

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

our social behavior as learned behavior that functioned

for survival in a sexist world: we painted ourselves,

smiled, exposed legs and ass, had children, kept

house, as our accommodations to the reality o f power

politics.

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

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

dle-class lifestyle we were the oppressors o f other

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

Chicana sisters —and the men who in turn oppressed

them. This closely interwoven fabric o f oppression,

which is the racist class structure o f Amerika today,

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

foot heavy on the belly o f another human being.

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

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

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

us in payment for the many functions we performed.

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

willing concubines the world has ever known. We had

Woman Hating

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

health and long lives.

The women’s movement has not dealt with this

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

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

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

no program to deal with the realities of the class system

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

movement has, with appalling blindness, refused to take

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

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

concrete needs of all classes of women. The anger at

the Nixon administration for cutting day-care funds is

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

capital in Amerika, it is ridiculous to expect the federal

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

money available to middle-class women who identify

as feminists must be channeled into the programs we

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

middle-class women have absolutely refused to take any

action, make any commitment which would interfere

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

standard, which is moneyed and privileged.

The analysis of sexism in this book articulates

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

some women have access to significant wealth, but that

wealth does not signify power; women are to be found

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

respect or strength, since those qualities are directly

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

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

use guns because they were symbols o f manhood, but

found the courage to act as they did because they were

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

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

to be torturous for that reason alone.

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

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

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

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

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

Woman Hating

part of its definition death, is the identity of primary

emergency. This is an important recognition because it

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

that many Black women (by no means all) experience

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

revolutionary work.

As a writer with a revolutionary commitment, I am

particularly pained by the kinds of books writers are

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

books because they are committed to the content of

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

want writers to write books that can make a difference

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

write books that are worth being jailed for, worth

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

worth dying for.

Books are for the most part in Amerika commercial

ventures. People write them to make money, to become

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

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

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

person. Because o f this strange schizophrenia, books

and the writing o f them have become embroidery on a

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

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

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

same process, we destroy with regularity the few serious

Introduction

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

bleed them o f all privacy and courage and common

sense, exorcise their vision from them as sport, demand

that they entertain or be ignored into oblivion. And it

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

been more important than it is now in Amerika.

Many see that in this nightmared land, language has

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

see that the triumph o f authoritarian consciousness is

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

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

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

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

using words to communicate, as community.

Those o f us who love reading and writing believe

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

truth. It means being incorruptible. It means not being

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

and writing feel great pain because so many people

who write books have become cowards, clowns, and

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

to feel a deadly contempt for books, because we see

writers being bought and sold in the market place — we

see them vending their tarnished wares on every street

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

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

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

the community, and an absolute responsibility to the

Woman Hating

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

Specifically Woman Hating is about women and

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

We begin with fairy tales, the first scenarios of women

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

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

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

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

pornographic definitions of women functioning in

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

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

dimensions of the oppression, the anguish and misery

that are a direct consequence of polar role definition,

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

rebuilding it as we can imagine it.

I write however with a broken tool, a language which

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

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

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

the language.

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

others. I thank my sisters who everywhere are standing

Introduction

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

thank my sisters, these particular women whose work

has contributed so much to my own consciousness and

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

I also thank those others who have, through their

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

Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Daniel Berrigan, Jean

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

Leary.

I thank my friends in Amsterdam who were family

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

me in very hard times.

I thank Mel Clay who believed in this book from its

most obscure beginnings, the editors o f Suck and in

particular Susan Janssen, Deborah Rogers, Martin

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

long time ago that O was an oppressed person. Chapter

3 is dedicated to Brian.

I thank Karen Malpede and Garland Harris for their

support and help. I thank Joan Schenkar for pushing

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

I thank Grace Paley, Karl Bissinger, Kathleen

Norris, and Muriel Rukeyser. Without their love and

friendship this work would never have been done.

Without their examples o f strength and commitment,

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

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

Woman Hating

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

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

that I could learn to believe in myself.

Andrea Dworkin

New York City, July 1973

Part One

THE FAIRY TALES

You cannot be free if you are contained

within a fiction.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

Once upon a time there was a wicked witch and her

name was

Lilith

Eve

Hagar

Jezebel

Delilah

Pandora

Jahi

Tam ar

and there was a wicked witch and she was also called

goddess and her name was

Kali

Fatima

Artemis

Hera

Isis

Mary

Ishtar

and there was a wicked witch and she was also called

queen and her name was

Bathsheba

Woman Hating

Vashti

Cleopatra

Helen

Salome

Elizabeth

Clytemnestra

Medea

and there was a wicked witch and she was also called

witch and her name was

Joan

Circe

Morgan le Fay

Tiamat

Maria Leonza

Medusa

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

hated, desired, and worshiped.

When one enters the world of fairy tale one seeks

with difficulty for the actual place where legend and

history part. One wants to locate the precise moment

when fiction penetrates into the psyche as reality, and

history begins to mirror it. Or vice versa. Women

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

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

fairy tale —the wicked witch, the beautiful princess,

the heroic prince —we find what the culture would have

us know about who we are.

The point is that we have not formed that ancient

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

whole, had its values and consciousness imprinted on

our minds as cultural absolutes long before we were in

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

Woman Hating

childhood with us into maturity, chewed but still lying

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

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

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

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

the Great Steed and buying Snow-white from the

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

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

Despite ourselves, sometimes unknowing, sometimes

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

the roles we were taught.

Here is the beginning, where we learn who we must

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

C H A P T E R 1

Onceuponatime: The Roles

Death is that remedy all singers dream of

Allen Ginsberg

The culture predetermines who we are, how we behave,

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

We are bom into a sex role which is determined by

visible sex, or gender.

We follow explicit scenarios of passage from birth

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

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

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

Death is our only remedy. We imagine heaven.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

which is annihilating, totalitarian, which forbids us any

real self-becoming or self-realization.

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

Onceuponatime: The Roles

models, and their fearful, dreadful content terrorizes

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

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

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

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

searches his kingdom to find Cinderella; the heroic

prince marries Snow-white. But the terror remains as

the substratum o f male-female relation — the terror

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

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

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

evil.

Terror, then, is our real theme.

The Mother as a Figure of Terror

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

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

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

George Gilder, Sexual Suicide

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

queen who sat at her window and did embroidery.

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

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

Woman Hating

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ambitious and recognized that beauty was coin in the

male realm, that beauty translated directly into power

because it meant male admiration, male alliance, male

devotion.

The new queen had a magic mirror and she would

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

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

(had there been anyone fairer we can presume that the

king would have married her).

One day the queen asked her mirror who the fairest

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

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

Snow-white was 7 years old.

The queen became “yellow and green with envy,

and from that hour her heart turned against Snow-

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

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

no peace.. . . ” 5

Now, we all know what nations will do to achieve

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

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

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

bring back her heart. The huntsman, an uninspired

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

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

Onceuponatime: The Roles

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

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

there was an end o f Snow-white. ” 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sleeps but never quite died. Finally the wicked queen

made a poisoned apple and induced the ever vigilant

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

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

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

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

heroic prince was just passing that way, immediately

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

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

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

piece o f poisoned apple that Snow-white had swallowed

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

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

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

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

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

queen was invited to the wedding, which she attended

because her mirror told her that the bride was fairer

Woman Haling

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

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

dead. ” 10

Cinderella’s mother-situation was the same. Her

biological mother was good, pious, passive, and soon

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

to do heavy domestic work, and when her work was

done, her stepmother would throw lentils into the ashes

of the stove and make Cinderella separate the lentils

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

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

stepmother knew how the social structure operated,

and she was determined to succeed on its terms.

Cinderella’s stepmother was presumably motivated

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

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

basis of human (male-dominated) sexuality:

[When the prince began to search for the woman whose

foot would fit the golden slipper] the two sisters were

very glad, because they had pretty feet. The eldest

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

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

Onceuponatime: The Roles

for the shoe was too small; then her mother handed

her a knife, and said,

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

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

and squeezed her foot into the shoe, concealed the

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

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

Then the prince looked at her shoe, and saw the

blood flowing. And he turned his horse round and

took the false bride home again, saying that she was

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

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

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

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

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

never have to go on foot. ”

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

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

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

Then the prince looked at her foot, and saw how

the blood was flowing. . . . 11

Cinderella’s stepmother understood correctly that her

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

Her goal was upward mobility, and her ruthlessness was

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

loved her daughters the way Nixon loves the freedom o f

the Indochinese, and with much the same result. Love

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

dored thing.

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

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

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

6, “Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding. ”

Woman Hating

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

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

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

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

craved more. When the witch discovered the theft, she

made this offer:

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

one condition — the child that will come into the world

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

I will care for it like a mother. 13

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

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

not do much better by her:

When she was twelve years old the witch shut her up

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

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

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

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

The heroic prince, having finished with Snow-white

and Cinderella, now happened upon Rapunzel. When

the witch discovered the liaison, she beat up Rapunzel,

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

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

The witch then confronted the prince, who fell from the

tower and blinded himself on thorns. (He recovered

when he found Rapunzel, and they then lived happily

ever after. )

Onceuponatime: The Roles

Hansel and Grethel had a mother too. She simply

abandoned them:

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

children early in the morning into the forest, where

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

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

work and leave them alone; they will never find the

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

Hungry, lost, frightened, the children find a candy

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

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

These fairy-tale mothers are mythological female

figures. T hey define for us the female character and

delineate its existential possibilities. When she is good,

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

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

has one real function, motherhood. In that function,

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

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

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

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

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

Woman Haling

The Beauteous Lump of Ultimate Good

What can it do? It grows,

It bleeds. It sleeps.

It walks. It talks,

Singing, “love’s got me, got me. ”

Kathleen Norris

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

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

most winning quality.

Sleeping Beauty slept for 100 years, after pricking

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

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

or was it because she was asleep?

Snow-white was already dead when the heroic prince

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

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

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

distinguishable from it asleep.

Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow-white, Rapunzel

—all are characterized by passivity, beauty, innocence,

and victimization. They are archetypal good women —

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

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

They have one scenario of passage. They are moved,

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

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

are objects o f romantic adoration. They do nothing to

warrant either.

That one other figure of female good, the good

fairy, appears from time to time, dispensing clothes

Onceuponatime: The Roles

or virtue. H er power cannot match, only occasionally

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

one physical activity at which she excels — she waves her

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

she disappears.

These figures o f female good are the heroic models

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

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

to dream?

The Prince, the Real Brother

The man of flesh and bone; the man who

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

dies; the man who eats and drinks and

plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the

man who is seen and heard; the brother,

the real brother.

Miguel de Unamuno,

Tragic Sense of Life

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

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

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

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

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

plunder. T hey use airplanes now.

What matters is that he is both powerful and good,

that his power is by definition good. What matters is

that he matters, acts, succeeds.

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

Woman Haling

For instance, he cannot distinguish Cinderella from her

two sisters though he danced with her and presumably

conversed with her. His recurring love o f corpses does

not indicate a dynamic intelligence either. His fall from

the tower onto thorns does not suggest that he is even

physically coordinated, though, unlike his modern

counterparts, he never falls off his horse or annihilates

the wrong village.

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

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

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

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

shabby reality of the man as hero.

The Husband, the Real Father

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

George Gilder, Sexual Suicide

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

again by definition, powerful and good. They are never

responsible or held accountable for the evil done by

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

it.

There is, of course, no rational basis for considering

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

progeny. But then, in some cultures nonfairy-tale

Onceuponatime: The Roles

fathers simply had their female children killed at birth.

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

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

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

heart. When his wife proposed to him that they abandon

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

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

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

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

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

misunderstand —they did not forgive him, for there was

nothing to forgive. All malice originated with the

woman. He was a good man.

Though the fairy-tale father marries the evil woman

in the first place, has no emotional connection with his

child, does not interact in any meaningful way with

her, abandons her and worse does not notice when she

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

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

T he roles available to women and men are clearly

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

vividly described, and so are the modes o f relationship

possible between them. We see that powerful women

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

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

not do.

We also have an explicit rendering o f the nuclear

Woman Hating

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

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

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

tion of sexist culture —the nuclear structure of that

culture.

C H A P T E R 2

Onceuponatime: The Moral

of the Story

Fuck that to death, the dead are holy,

Honor the sisters of your friends.

Pieces of ass, a piece of action,

Pieces.

The loneliest of mornings

Something moves about in the mirror.

A slave’s trick, survival.

I remember thinking, our last time:

If you killed me, I would die.

Kathleen Norris

I cannot live without my life.

Emily Bronte

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

Men and women are different, absolute opposites.

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

Men and women are different, absolute opposites.

T he good father can never be confused with the bad

mother. T h eir qualities are different, polar.

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

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

Woman Hating

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

destroyed.

It is, structurally at least, that simple.

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

Her other persona, the evil mother, is repulsive in

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

She is the female protagonist, the nonmale source of

power which must be defeated, obliterated, before male

power can fully flower. She is repulsive because she is

evil. She is evil because she acts.

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

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

There are two definitions of woman. There is the

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

She must be destroyed. The good woman must be

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

Both must be nullified.

The bad woman must be punished, and if she is

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

Women strive for passivity, because women want to

be good. The abuse evoked by that passivity convinces

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

destroyed, so that they can become good.

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

Onceuponatlme: The Moral of the Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part Two

THE PORNOGRAPHY

Among my brethren are many who dream

with wet pleasure of the eight hundred

pains and humiliations, but I am the other

kind: I am a slave who dreams of escape

after escape, I dream only of escaping,

ascent, of a thousand possible ways to

make a hole in the wall, of melting the

bars, escape escape, of burning the whole

prison down if necessary.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

Bookshop shelves are lined with pornography. It is a

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

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

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

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

o f men and women?

Literary pornography is the cultural scenario o f

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

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

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

erotic desire; woman, her carnality adult and explicit,

her role as victim adult and explicit, her guilt adult

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

end annihilation —death or complete submission.

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

Woman Hating

is the structure of male and female mind, the content

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

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

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

how can we bear it?

C H A P T E R 3

Woman as Victim:

Story of O

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also, O is particularly compelling for me because I

once believed it to be what its defenders claim — the

mystical revelation o f the true, eternal, and sacral

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

wrote: “What lifts this fascinating book above mere

Woman Haling

perversity is its movement toward the transcendence

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

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

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

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

Rene to Roissy and cloistered there; she is fucked,

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

regular and continuing basis —she is programmed to

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

properly trained she is sent home with her lover; her

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

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

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

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

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

model for Jacqueline’s younger sister Natalie who is

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

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

despoiled, raped, gangbanged; realizing that there is

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

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

Woman as Victim: Story of O

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

is never big on plot.

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

or the various rapes and tortures perpetrated on her by

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

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

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

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

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

passivity, nothingness, a submission so absolute that

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

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

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

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

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

demands, is connected, even symbolically, to a personal

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

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

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

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

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

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

phenomenal.

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

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

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

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

Woman Hating

and good. It ends necessarily in her annihilation, which

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

she fulfills her destiny:

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

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

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

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

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

herself for her own desire, and loathed Sir Stephen

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

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

to be chafing under the urge to touch her lips and

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

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

really wanting to, Rene was punishing her for a sin

he knew nothing about (since it remained completely

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

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

could ever compete with the happiness she felt at the

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

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

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

body, he might search for pleasure. 5

O is totally possessed. That means that she is an

object, with no control over her own mobility, capable

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

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

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

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

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

Woman as Victim: Story of O

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

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

the miraculous— she incorporates the divine.

Here sacrifice has its ancient, primal meaning:

that which was given at the beginning becomes the gift.

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

consumed by the vegetation spirit which provided them.

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

sacrifice or the consumption o f the offering was the

very definition o f the sacrifice—death was necessary

because the victim was or represented the life-giving

substance, the vital energy source, which had to be

liberated, which only death could liberate. A n actual

death, the sacrifice per se, not only liberated benevolent

energy but also ensured a propagation and increase o f

life energy (concretely expressed as fertility) by a sort

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

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

power, a power which is transcendental and which has

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

regeneration.

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

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

entry into ecstasy, union with and illumination o f the

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

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

were able to alchemize their energy into pure spirit

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

Woman Hating

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

by its very nature demonic because its goal is power,

its means are violence and oppression. It spills the blood

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

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

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

Their relationship is the incarnation of demonic possession:

Thus he would possess her as a god possesses his

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

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

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

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

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

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

her immediately, to reclaim her enriched in his eyes,

like some common object which had been used for some

divine purpose and has thus been consecrated. For a

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

delighted to feel that the pleasure he was deriving

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

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

would be more humiliated and ravished. Since she

loved him, she could not help loving whatever derived

from him. 6

A precise corollary of possession is prostitution. The

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

to which the possessor puts her. Her subjugation is the

signet o f his power. Prostitution means for the woman

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

man it once again signifies an increase in power, pure

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

Woman as Victim: Story of O

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

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

so perfectly provided the living proof that she was

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

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

religious prostitution. T h e ancient sacral prostitution

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

expression o f respect and veneration for the powers o f

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

the temple were literal personifications o f the life energy

o f the earth goddess, and transferred that energy to

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

their continuing and repeated union could the fertility

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

Sacred prostitution was “nothing less than an act o f

communion with god (or godhead) and was as remote

from sensuality as the Christian act o f communion is

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

Roissy are distinguished by their sterility and bear no

resemblance whatsoever to any known goddess. No

mention is ever made o f conception or menstruation,

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

fertility has been rendered O. T here is nothing sacred

about O ’s prostitution.

O ’s degradation is occasioned by the male need for

Woman Hating

and fear of initiation into manhood. Initiation rites

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

successful initiate. The process of initiation is designed

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

confers on the initiate the responsibilities and privileges

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

substitutes for their bodies. O is marked with the scars

which they should bear. She undergoes their ordeal

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

The fact that the tortures must be repeated endlessly,

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

forced as well as persuaded, demonstrates that the men

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

never achieve the security of realized manhood.

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

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

are permanent wedding rings rightly placed. They

mark her as an owned object and in no way symbolize

the passage into maturity and freedom. The same might

be said o f the conventional wedding ring.

in her never-ending role as surrogate everything,

also is the direct sexual link between Sir Stephen and

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

Woman as Victim: Story of O

other through O is made clear by the fact that Sir

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

But what is most extraordinary about Story of O is

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

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

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

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

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

doubtful, attracted yet repelled, there is this schema for

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

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

only have to double-double unthink it.

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

survival o f one dependent on the absolute destruction

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

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

dead bodies.

C H A P T E R 4

Woman as Victim:

The Image

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

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

makes more clear the Christian experience of woman

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

almost clinical dissection of role-playing and its sex-

relatedness, of duality as the structural basis of male-

female violence.

It would be an exaggeration of some substance to

call the following a summary of plot, but what happens

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

Image, meets Claire, whom he has known casually for

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

her, but her coldness, aloofness, and perfect beauty

made her lack the necessary vulnerability which would

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

conquest; Claire introduces him to Anne, Innocent

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

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

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

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

Woman as Victim: The Image

they go to a restaurant where Claire shames Anne, an

event often repeated (Claire shames Anne by ordering

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

tradition for which Anne modeled, except for the last

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

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

Jean de Berg takes Anne to buy lingerie and humiliates

Anne and embarrasses the salesgirl by exhibiting A nne’s

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

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

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

that he would like to fuck Claire —which causes Claire

to increase the viciousness o f her assaults on Anne;

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

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

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

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

happily ever after.

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

did not mention that Anne was forced to piss in public

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

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

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

how she was made to serve Claire and Jean de Berg

orangeade before they stuck burning needles in her

breasts.

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

Woman Hating

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

her:

Claire was very beautiful, as I said, probably even

more beautiful than her friend in the white dress. But

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

her very perfection that made it impossible to think of

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

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

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

her remoteness made me think of some goddess in

exile." 3 Here the female characterization is explicit:

vulnerability as the main quality of the human; coldness

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

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

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

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

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

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

says that Anne creams at each new humiliation, at even

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woman at Victim: The Image

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

ravaging, powerful and overwhelmingly virile when in

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

except to imagine that he is graying at the temples.

T h e relationships between the three characters are

structured simply and a bit repetitively: Claire, master —

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

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

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

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

can only find happiness in the female/slave role.

Here we are told what society would have us know

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

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

cock, incapable o f achieving whole, organic, satisfying

sexual union without the intrusion and participation

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

male role — that figure must possess biological cock and

balls. Claire and Anne as biological females enact a

comedy, grotesque in its slapstick caricature: Claire

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

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

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

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

other’s feet in another vain attempt to secure wealth

Woman Hating

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

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

hardly instruments of ravishment and ecstasy. Biology,

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

message is strangely familiar.

Pauline Reage, the major promoter of The Image as

a piece of metaphysical veracity, sees the function,

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

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

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

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

of her displeasure. His sole function is to perform the

various ceremonies that center around the sacred object. 5

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

slave is here transmuted into the source of power. What

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

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

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

her power takes is that she “drag herself along the

ground at her master’s heels. ”

The man, Reage instructs us, has the illusion of

power because he wields the whip. That illusion marks

for Reage the distance between carnal knowledge and

what is, more profoundly, true:

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

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

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

Woman as Victim: The Image

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

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

become one with his god.

The woman, on the contrary, although just as much

of a true worshiper and possessed of that same anxious

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

endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn, whose only joy,

achieved through a subtle interplay of images, lies in

contemplation of herself. 6

Having noted in the last chapter Reage’s extraordinary

facility with the double-double think, which she uses

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

conclusions. It is surprising that the worship o f the

divine object, the woman as victim and executioner,

should involve any external mediation, especially that

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

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

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

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

Surely, with such divine endowments and attendant

satisfactions, she need not be coaxed or seduced into

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

men who introduce their mistresses to the joys o f being

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

or initiating other women, who serve as a substitute or

mirror image or other half. Men often insist that women

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

Both execute their roles effectively. No male figure is

required mythologically unless Jean de Berg would play

the eunuch-priest, that traditional helpmate o f the

Woman Hating

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

Conversely, only men have been permitted to serve

male gods; eunuchs and women, synonymous here,

have been strictly excluded from those holy rites. The

proper conclusion therefore is that man, not woman, is

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

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

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

knife ready for the ritual carving. That a man becomes

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

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

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

the truth in this instance than double-double think.

The Image is rife with Christian symbolism. One of

the more memorable sequences in the book takes place

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

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

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

which Anne handles as though it were a moist, ready

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

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

protests that there is a prohibition against picking the

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

hesitation necessitates punishment. She is ordered to

Woman at Victim: The Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eliphas Levi says o f it:

It was the flesh in rebellion against the oppression

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

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

stifled by the celibate; it was life in revolt against

sterility; it was humanity aspiring towards natural

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

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

for initiates, was the living floral symbol. 9

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

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

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

Church, in its unending struggle against carnality and

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

Christianity by using the rose as an instrument o f pain

and blood-letting.

Woman Hating

The photographs which Claire shows to Jean

de Berg are also overflowing with symbolic importance.

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

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

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

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

participate in her own annihilation. Such is the scenario

which permits her a Christian salvation, which redeems

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

self-love. The photographs are “really nothing more

than religious pictures, steps along the way of a new

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

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

this particular road, it is only because the bodies of

martyrs other than Anne and Claire lie piled so deep.

It is only too obvious that the tortured, mutilated

woman who appears first as Anne, then as the more

impersonal victim of the photographs, and finally

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

many triangular stab wounds in the most propitious

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

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

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

punishment scarcely equals the horror o f her crime.

That crime, of course, is biological womanhood. Jesus

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

Woman at Victim: The Image

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

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

then again. No cruelty will ever be proper atonement

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

Christianity has one other image o f woman, Mary,

the Madonna, the Virgin Mother. Jean de Berg dreams

o f Claire as the Madonna shortly before he beats and

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

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

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

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

from nature, innocent by virtue o f the abandonment

o f her real, and most honorable, sexuality.

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

sexual perversion, crueler and more insidious than

those sex models condemned by the culture as perverse.

T h e Christian institutionalization o f that worship,

its cultivation and refinement, have aborted women in

the development and expression o f natural sexuality by

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

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

rose, spirit and nature is inherent in Christianity and

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

meat o f most sadomasochistic pornography, just as the

Christian definition o f woman is its justification. Lenny

Bruce expressed it very simply when he said this:

I understand that intellectually — that a woman

who sleeps with a different guy every week is a better

Woman Haling

Christian than the virgin. Because she has the capacity

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

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

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

you can’t make it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

should know.

C H A P T E R 5

Woman as Victim:

Suck

We move from the straight literary pornography o f our

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

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

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

post sex revolution (Freudian, Reichian, Mailerian,

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

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

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

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

responsible. Since we seek in that world freedom as

women, defined in radical terms, achieved through a

concretely lived lifestyle, newspapers like Suck, Oz, and

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

But the counter-culture sex papers are created by

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

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

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

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

Woman Hating

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

Children of Amerika. Eldridge Cleaver calls us the

Children of BLOOD. It is our parents, Amerika,

BLOOD, who through their moral bankruptcy and

genocidal ways have forced us from the womb onto the

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

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

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

with our own children. We are the tribes of Woodstock

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

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

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

is only prologue.

Generally we are between 24 and 35 years old; have

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

us seek to develop radical forms of community, to live

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

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

and we simultaneously seek to develop alternatives to

those forms. There are diminishing numbers of peace

freaks among us (totally committed to nonviolent revo-

Woman as Victim: Suck

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

least in our Amerikan manifestation, white, children

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

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

privacy, friends, companionship from family and peers.

We are unbelievably well educated —we went to fine

suburban schools (mostly public) where we experienced

physical and intellectual regimentation which we found

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

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

shit when it came to applying egalitarian principles in

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

we studied all o f these disembodied ideas continued

doing defense work for the Amerikan government. We

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

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

would be.

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

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

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

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

Woman Hating

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

it take some positive step in the direction we want to

go: we demand that it incorporate our radical attitudes,

the knowledge that acid and other parts of our lifestyle

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

permit it to reinforce the dual-role sexist patterns and

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

Suck is a typical counter-culture sex paper. Any

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

expressed primarily as sadomasochism, absolutely the

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

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

it is not.

The first issue of Suck appeared in Amsterdam,

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

that is, its pages contain pornographic fiction, technical

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

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

Woman as Victim: Suck

money and material for publication. Suck is confiscated

in England and France with some vigor.

Suck has made positive contributions. Sucking is

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

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

particular, the emphasis on sucking cunt serves to

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

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

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

seen, touched, tasted.

T he taboo against sucking goes very deep. Most of

the actual laws against cocksucking and cuntsucking

relate to prohibitions against any sexual activity that

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

o f effecting, impregnation. Sucking as an act leading

to orgasm places the nature o f sexual contact clearly —

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

value is in the coming together. Marriage does not

sanctify that coming together, procreation is not its

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

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

barriers to the realization o f a full sexuality.

Cunnilingus and fellatio (sucking by any other name

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

to be prosecuted). Given the selective enforcement o f

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

and the fact that acts o f oral lovemaking represented

Woman Hating

in words or in pictures are generally deemed obscene,

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

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

(Important digression. As late as October 1961,

Lenny Bruce was arrested because in one o f his routines

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

sucking. He was arrested for the crime of obscenity.

Bruce described the bust:

I was arrested for obscenity in San Francisco for using

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

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

it was vernacular for a favorite homosexual practice —

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

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

Bruce was busted for obscenity in New York City, in

1965 he was declared a legally bankrupt pauper, and

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

Suck also makes a contribution in printing pictures

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

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

hair. But having seen a remarkable movie by Anne

Severson and Shelby Kennedy2 in which a fixed camera

catalogues the cunts of many different women, all ages,

Woman as Victim: Suck

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

comprehension o f the superficiality o f the Suck cunt

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

faces —the colors, textures, indentations, the unique

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

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

Germaine Greer once wrote for Suck — she was an

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

were sometimes strong; her voice was always authentic.

Her attempt was to bring women into closer touch with

unaltered female sexuality and place that sexuality

clearly, unapologetically, within the realm o f humanity:

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

revolutionary concept.

But Greer has another side which allies itself with

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

believe, made her articles acceptable to Suck's editors

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

‘I am a W hore, ’ ” she stated:

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

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

We have to rescue people who are already dead.

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

that’s not easy. 3

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

the pill was supposed to liberate women by liberating

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

Woman Hating

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

served to reinforce our essential bondage —it made us

more accessible, more open to exploitation. It did not

change our basic condition because it did nothing to

challenge the sexist structure of society, not to mention

conventional sexual relationships and couplings. Neither

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

revolution is, sadly but implicitly, an alliance with male

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

There is similar misunderstanding in this statement:

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

to understand, and I get a bit impatient sometimes with

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

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

prettier she is the more expensive, the more difficult

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

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

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

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

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

and yet another index o f how the American dream is

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

never will.

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

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

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

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

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

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

revolution, have not put myself on the barricade on

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

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

Woman as Victim: Suck

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

them too. 4

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

is incomprehensible. Mothers fuck up people’s lives in

direct proportion to how fucked up their own lives are

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

possibilities they must abort. Greer surely knows that

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

those who take taxis or drive (another relevant class

distinction), are constantly harassed, often threatened

with violence, often violated. That is the situation which

is the daily life o f women.

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

are objects, commodities, some deemed more expensive

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

every time, in all situations, that one becomes someone

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

our struggle.

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

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

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

morally superior to masturbation. Eldridge Cleaver

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

she posits rape as an act o f aggression against property

(a political anticapitalist action no less) and suggests

that it might also be an act o f psychological rebellion

against the ominous, and omnipresent, mother. * Rape

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

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

Woman Hating

is, in fact, simple straightforward heterosexual behavior

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

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

without sham —without the mystifying romance of the

couple, without the civility of a money exchange. It

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

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

What Greer contributes to Suck, and to its women

readers who might look to her for cogent analysis and

deep imagination, is mostly confusion. That confusion

stems from an identification with men which too often

blunts her perception of the real, empirical problems

women face in a sexist society. That confusion manifests

itself most destructively in the patently untrue notion

that a woman who fucks freely is free.

The main body of Suck is pornographic fiction. It is

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

Two men watch a pornographic movie. They have a

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

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

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

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

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

comes, Beno shoots him. An example of the purple

prose:

In a sudden spasm the man clutches her head and

arches his back and as the beginning sensations of

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

Woman as Victim: Suck

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

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

course, the vehicle o f her recognition that she loves

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

contains incredible violence. Beno whips his male lover,

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

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

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

precisely the same: insatiable cunt, to be violated and

abused; the sadomasochistic content is the same; even

the exaggerated genitalia o f the Blacks participate in

the worst o f the pornographic tradition.

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

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

story: “the social gu lf accentuated the mounting thrill

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

been thoroughly used, is described like this:

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

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

Helen, whose resemblance to that other well-known sex

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

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

Woman Hating

The overwhelming fact which emerges about Suck

fiction is that it contains and expresses the traditional

male fantasies about women. Helen and Carol differ

little from O and Claire. Their needs can be articulated

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

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

Men have always known, in that existential-accord-

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

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

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

her reluctance is merely tactic. What matters is that she

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

fucked. We find in Suck these sacrosanct male fantasies

applied with true counter-culture egalitarianism: to

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

Projection has come home to roost and cock is crowing

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

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

guilt and pure sadism. The onus and hatred of male

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

present.

Suck has in some ways aligned itself with the cause

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

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

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

of cock sucked in one idyllic week in Amsterdam’s

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

Woman as Victim: Suck

deviation from the ole hetero norm, the hatred attached

to the queer is very apparent.

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

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

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

acknowledged (overt) queer has the typical misogynist

point o f view:

Carlos explained that the male body was nature’s

perfection and how clean men were compared to

women. 10

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

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

The insecurities which a homosexual identity conjures

up in our culture, however, are hardly resolved through

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

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

absurd for a man to believe that what is pleasurable to

him when done by a woman is disgusting when done by

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

political meaning o f the two acts, heterosexual fellatio

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

the man clearly the master —the woman kneels at the

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

ours is not to reason why, or is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

mouth. 11

The resultant orgasm is fantastic, mind-blowing, as

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

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

Reciprocity is something else. Could it be reciprocity

that makes one queer?

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

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

find some other queer to suck his cock. 12

Hot Rock Carlos is undaunted. After much patient

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

Says our hero:

Funny I do not consider myself queer, just damn lucky

to be able to attract so many good looking young boys

so they could have their rock inside me. 14

Only now does the definitive definition of queer seem

to emerge. Cocksucking isn’t the definitive experience

after all. One must conclude that anal intercourse,

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

Woman as Victim: Suck

them squarely among the women. O ne must conclude

that being penetrated is queer, not to mention debasing,

disgusting, and humiliating, which one had already

guessed.

Homosexual men are not only penetrated like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and I had two more toss-offs myself thinking about

their tough young faces and dicks enjoying me for

hot kicks. 15

T h e stereotype o f the homosexual which emerges

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

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

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

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

on pain and so does she. Gangbanging is their mutual

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

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

sadomasochistic script are the same: so are costumes,

attitudes, and other conventional cultural baggage. It

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

The fantasies (indicative of structural mental sets) which

oppress male homosexuals and women are very much

alike. Women and male homosexuals are united in

their queerness, a union which is real and verifiable —

affirmed by Suck, which contributes to the cultural

oppression of both.

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

sexual liberation — there is no “counter” to the culture to be found anywhere in them. They are, instead, a catalogue of exactly those sexist fantasies which

express our most morbid psychic sets. They chart the

landscape of repression, a landscape that is surprisingly

familiar. As women, we find that we are where we have

always been: the necessary victim, there we are, the

victim again; the eternal object, there we are, the object again. Through the projection of archetypal sadomasochistic images, which are the staple of the sexist mentality, we become more a prisoner, robbed and

cheated of any real experience or authentic communication, thrown back into the intricate confusion of being women in search of a usable identity.

Part Three

THE HERSTORY

We are a feelingless people. If we could

really feel, the pain would be so great that

we would stop all the suffering. If we could

feel that one person every six seconds dies

of starvation (and as this is happening, this

writing, this reading, someone is dying of

starvation) we would stop it. If we could

really feel it in the bowels, the groin, in

the throat, in the breast, we would go into

the streets and stop the war, stop slavery,

stop the prisons, stop the killings, stop

destruction. Ah, I might learn what love is.

When we feel, we will feel the emergency: when we feel the emergency, we

will act: when we act, we will change the

world.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

T he rapes, tortures, and violations o f O, Claire, Anne,

Suck's Helen, et al., are fiction, documenting the twisted

landscape o f male wish-fulfillment. Here we have her-

story, the underbelly o f history, two acts o f gynocide

committed against women by men, their scope and substance largely ignored. One is not surprised to find that they document that same twisted landscape.

I isolate in particular Chinese footbinding and the

persecution o f the witches because they are crimes

which equal in sheer horror and sadism the extermination o f Native Americans and Hitler’s massacre o f the Jews. Those two horrendous slaughters have found a

place, however tenuous, in the “conscience” o f “man. ”

Acts o f genocide against women have barely been noticed, and they have never evoked rage, or horror, or sorrow. That sexist hatred equals racist hatred in its

intensity, irrationality, and contempt for the sanctity

o f human life these two examples clearly demonstrate.

That women have not been exterminated, and will not

be (at least until the technology o f creating life in the

laboratory is perfected) can be attributed to our presumed ability to bear children and, more importantly 93

Woman Hating

no doubt, to the relative truth that men prefer to fuck

cunts who are nominally alive. I except here necrophili-

acs, those pure and unsullied princes, whose story begins where ours ends.

In addition, in any war, in any violence between

tribes or nations, a specific war crime is perpetrated

against women —that of rape. Every woman raped

during a political nation-state war is the victim of a

much larger war, planetary in its dimensions —the war,

more declared than we can bear to know, that men wage

against women. That war had its most gruesome, grotesque expression when Chinese men bound the feet of Chinese women and when British, Welsh, Irish,

Scottish, German, Dutch, French, Swiss, Italian, Spanish,

and Amerikan men had women burned at the stake in

the name of God the Father and His only Son.

F O O T B I N D I N G E V E N T

Instructions Before Reading Chapter

1. Find a piece o f cloth 10 feet long and 2 inches wide

2. Find a pair o f children’s shoes

3. Bend all toes except the big one under and into the

sole o f the foot. W rap the cloth around these toes

and then around the heel. Bring the heel and toes as

close together as possible. W rap the full length o f

the cloth as tightly as possible

4. Squeeze foot into children’s shoes

5. Walk

6. Imagine that you are 5 years old

7. Imagine being like this for the rest o f your life

C H A P T E R 6

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding

T he origins o f Chinese footbinding, as o f Chinese

thought in general, belong to that amorphous entity

called antiquity. The 10th century marks the beginning o f the physical, intellectual, and spiritual dehumanization o f women in China through the institution o f footbinding. That institution itself, the implicit belief

in its necessity and beauty, and the rigor with which it

was practiced lasted another 10 centuries. T here were

sporadic attempts at emancipating the foot —some

artists, intellectuals, and women in positions o f power

were the proverbial drop in the bucket. Those attempts,

modest though they were, were doomed to failure:

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footbinding was a political institution which reflected

and perpetuated the sociological and psychological inferiority of women; footbinding cemented women to a certain sphere, with a certain function —women were

sexual objects and breeders. Footbinding was mass

attitude, mass culture —it was the key reality in a way

of life lived by real women— 10 centuries times that

many millions o f them.

It is generally thought that footbinding originated as

an innovation among the dancers of the Imperial

harem. Sometime between the 9th and 11th centuries,

Emperor Li Yu ordered a favorite ballerina to achieve

the “pointed look. ” The fairy tale reads like this:

Li Yu had a favored palace concubine named

Lovely Maiden who was a slender-waisted beauty and

a gifted dancer. He had a six-foot high lotus constructed for her out o f gold; it was decorated lavishly with pearls and had a carmine lotus carpet in the

center. Lovely Maiden was ordered to bind her feet

with white silk cloth to make the tips look like the

points o f a moon sickle. She then danced in the center

of the lotus, whirling about like a rising cloud. 1

From this original event, the bound foot received the

euphemism “Golden Lotus, ” though it is clear that

Lovely Maiden’s feet were bound loosely— she could still

dance.

A later essayist, a true foot gourmand, described 58

varieties of the human lotus, each one graded on a 9-

point scale. For example:

T ype: Lotus petal, New moon, Harmonious bow,

Bamboo shoot, Water chestnut

Specifications: plumpness, softness, fineness

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding

Rank:

Divine Quality (A-1), perfectly plump, soft and fine

Wondrous Quality (A-2), weak and slender

Immortal Quality (A-3), straight-boned, independent

Precious Article (B-1), peacocklike, too wide, dis-

proportioned

Pure Article (B-2), gooselike, too long and thin

Seductive Article (B-3), fleshy, short, wide, round

(the disadvantage of this foot was that its owner

could withstand a blowing wind)

Excessive Article (C-1), narrow but insufficiently

pointed

Ordinary Article (C-2), plump and common

False Article (C-3), monkeylike large heel (could

climb)

T he distinctions only emphasize that footbinding

was a rather hazardous operation. T o break the bones

involved or to modify the pressure o f the bindings irregularly had embarrassing consequences — no girl could bear the ridicule involved in being called a “largefooted Demon” and the shame o f being unable to marry.

Even the possessor o f an A - 1 Golden Lotus could

not rest on her laurels —she had to observe scrupulously

the taboo-ridden etiquette o f bound femininity: (1) do

not walk with toes pointed upwards; (2) do not stand

with heels seemingly suspended in midair; (3) do not

move skirt when sitting; (4) do not move feet when

lying down. T h e same essayist concludes his treatise

with this most sensible advice (directed to the gentlemen o f course):

Do not remove the bindings to look at her bare feet,

but be satisfied with its external appearance. Enjoy the

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outward impression, for if you remove the shoes and

bindings the aesthetic feeling will be destroyed forever. 2

Indeed. The real feet looked like this:

(feet: 3 to 4 inches in length)

The physical process which created this foot is

described by Howard S. Levy in Chinese Footbinding:

The History of a Curious Erotic Custom:

The success or failure of footbinding depended on

skillful application of a bandage around each foot. The

bandage, about two inches wide and ten feet long, was

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding

wrapped in the following way. One end was placed on

the inside of the instep, and from there it was carried

over the small toes so as to force the toes in and towards the sole. The large toe was left unbound. The bandage was then wrapped around the heel so forcefully that heel and toes were drawn closer together.

The process was then repeated from the beginning

until the entire bandage had been applied. The foot of

the young child was subjected to a coercive and unremitting pressure, for the object was not merely to confine the foot but to make the toes bend under and

into the sole and bring the heel and sole as close together as physically possible. 3

A C h ris tia n m is s io n a ry o b s e rve d :

The flesh often became putrescent during the binding

and portions sloughed off from the sole; sometimes

one or more toes dropped off. 4

A n e ld e rly C h in e s e w o m a n , as late as 1934, re m e m b e re d v iv id ly h e r c h ild h o o d e x p e rie n c e : Born into an old-fashioned family at P’ing-hsi, I was

inflicted with the pain of footbinding when I was seven

years old. I was an active child who liked to jump about,

but from then on my free and optimistic nature vanished. Elder Sister endured the process from six to eight years of age [this means that it took Elder Sister two years to attain the 3-inch foot]. It was in the first lunar month of my seventh year that my ears were

pierced and fitted with gold earrings. I was told that a

girl had to suffer twice, through ear piercing and footbinding. Binding started in the second lunar month; mother consulted references in order to select an

auspicious day for it. I wept and hid in a neighbor’s

100

Woman Hating

home, but Mother found me, scolded me, and dragged

me home. She shut the bedroom door, boiled water,

and from a box withdrew binding, shoes, knife, needle,

and thread. I begged for a one-day postponement, but

Mother refused: “Today is a lucky day, ” she said. “ If

bound today, your feet will never hurt; if bound tomorrow they will. ” She washed and placed alum on my feet and cut the toenails. She then bent my toes toward

the plantar with a binding cloth ten feet long and two

inches wide, doing the right foot first and then the

left. She finished binding and ordered me to walk,

but when I did the pain proved unbearable.

That night, Mother wouldn’t let me remove the

shoes. My feet felt on fire and I couldn’t sleep; Mother

struck me for crying. On the following days, I tried

to hide but was forced to walk on my feet. Mother hit

me on my hands and feet for resisting. Beatings and

curses were my lot for covertly loosening the wrappings. The feet were washed and rebound after three or four days, with alum added. After several months,

all toes but the big one were pressed against the inner

surface. Whenever I ate f ish or freshly killed meat,

my feet would swell, and the pus would drip. Mother

criticized me for placing pressure on the heel in walking, saying that my feet would never assume a pretty shape. Mother would remove the bindings and wipe

the blood and pus which dripped from my feet. She

told me that only with the removal o f the flesh could

my feet become slender. If I mistakenly punctured a

sore, the blood gushed like a stream. My somewhat

fleshy big toes were bound with small pieces o f cloth and

forced upwards, to assume a new moon shape.

Every two weeks, I changed to new shoes. Each

new pair was one- to two-tenths o f an inch smaller than

the previous one. The shoes were unyielding, and it

took pressure to get into them. Though I wanted to

sit passively by the K’ang, Mother forced me to move

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding

around. After changing more than ten pairs of shoes,

my feet were reduced to a little over four inches. I

had been in binding for a month when my younger

sister started; when no one was around, we would

weep together. In summer, my feet smelled offensively because of pus and blood; in winter, my feet felt cold because of lack of circulation and hurt if

they got too near the K'ang and were struck by warm

air currents. Four of the toes were curled in like so

many dead caterpillars; no outsider would ever have

believed that they belonged to a human being. It took

two years to achieve the three-inch model. My toenails pressed against the flesh like thin paper. The heavily-creased plantar couldn't be scratched when it

itched or soothed when it ached. My shanks were thin,

my feet became humped, ugly, and odiferous; how I

envied the natural-footed! 5

Bound feet were crippled and excruciatingly painful. T h e woman was actually “walking” on the outside o f toes which had been bent under into the sole o f the

foot. T he heel and instep o f the foot resembled the sole

and heel o f a high-heeled boot. Hard callouses formed;

toenails grew into the skin; the feet were pus-filled and

bloody; circulation was virtually stopped. T h e foot-

bound woman hobbled along, leaning on a cane, against

a wall, against a servant. T o keep her balance she took

very short steps. She was actually falling with every

step and catching herself with the next. Walking required tremendous exertion.

Footbinding also distorted the natural lines o f the

female body. It caused the thighs and buttocks, which

were always in a state o f tension, to become somewhat swollen (which men called “voluptuous”). A cu

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rious belief developed among Chinese men that footbinding produced a most useful alteration of the vagina. A Chinese diplomat explained:

The smaller the woman’s foot, the more wondrous

become the folds o f the vagina. (There was the saying: the smaller the feet, the more intense the sex urge. ) Therefore marriages in Ta-t’ung (where binding

is most effective) often take place earlier than elsewhere. Women in other districts can produce these folds artificially, but the only way is by footbinding,

which concentrates development in this one place.

There consequendy develop layer after layer (of folds

within the vagina); those who have personally experienced this (in sexual intercourse) feel a supernatural exaltation. So the system o f footbinding was not really oppressive. 6

Medical authorities confirm that physiologically footbinding had no effect whatsoever on the vagina, although it did distort the direction of the pelvis. The belief in the wondrous folds of the vagina of footbound

woman was pure mass delusion, a projection of lust

onto the feet, buttocks, and vagina of the crippled

female. Needless to say, the diplomat’s rationale for

finding footbinding “not really oppressive” confused

his “supernatural exaltation” with her misery and

mutilation.

Bound feet, the same myth continues, “made the

buttocks more sensual, [and] concentrated life-giving

vapors on the upper part of the body, making the face

more attractive. ” 7 If, due to a breakdown in the flow

o f these “life-giving vapors, ” an ugly woman was foot-

bound and still ugly, she need not despair, for an A -1

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding

103

Golden Lotus could compensate for a C-3 face and

figure.

But to return to herstory, how did our Chinese

ballerina become the millions o f women stretched over

10 centuries? T h e transition from palace dancer to population at large can be seen as part o f a class dynamic.

T h e emperor sets the style, the nobility copies it, and

the lower classes climbing ever upward do their best

to emulate it. T he upper class bound the feet o f their

ladies with the utmost severity. T h e Lady, unable to

walk, remained properly invisible in her boudoir, an

ornament, weak and small, a testimony to the wealth

and privilege o f the man who could afford to keep h e r—

to keep her idle. Doing no manual labor, she did not need

her feet either. Only on the rarest o f occasions was she

allowed outside o f the incarcerating walls o f her home,

and then only in a sedan chair behind heavy curtains.

T he lower a woman’s class, the less could such idleness

be supported: the larger the feet. T h e women who had

to work for the economic survival o f the family still

had bound feet, but the bindings were looser, the feet

bigger—after all, she had to be able to walk, even if

slowly and with little balance.

Footbinding was a visible brand. Footbinding did

not emphasize the differences between men and women —it

created them, and they were then perpetuated in the

name o f morality. Footbinding functioned as the C erberus o f morality and ensured female chastity in a nation o f women who literally could not “run around. ”

Fidelity, and the legitimacy o f children, could be reckoned on.

T he minds o f footbound women were as contracted

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as their feet. Daughters were taught to cook, supervise

the household, and embroider shoes for the Golden

Lotus. Intellectual and physical restriction had the usual

male justification. Women were perverse and sinful,

lewd and lascivious, if left to develop naturally. The

Chinese believed that being bom a woman was payment

for evils committed in a previous life. Footbinding was

designed to spare a woman the disaster of another such

incarnation.

Marriage and the family are the twin pillars of all

patriarchal cultures. Bound feet, in China, were the

twin pillars o f these twin pillars. Here we have the joining together of politics and morality, coupled to produce their inevitable offspring—the oppression of women based on totalitarian standards of beauty and a

rampant sexual fascism. In arranging a marriage, a

male's parents inquired first about the prospective

bride’s feet, then about her face. Those were her human, recognizable qualities. During the process of footbinding, mothers consoled their daughters by conjuring up the luscious marriage possibilities dependent on the beauty of the bound foot. Concubines for the Imperial harem were selected at tiny-foot festivals (forerunners of Miss America pageants). Rows upon rows of women sat on benches with their feet outstretched

while audience and judges went along the aisles and

commented on the size, shape, and decoration of foot

and shoes. No one, however, was ever allowed to touch

the merchandise. Women looked forward to these

festivals, since they were allowed out o f the house.

The sexual aesthetics, literally the art o f love, of

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the bound foot was complex. T h e sexual attraction o f

the foot was based on its concealment and the mystery

surrounding its development and care. T h e bindings

were unwrapped and the feet were washed in the

woman’s boudoir, in the strictest privacy. T h e frequency o f bathing varied from once a week to once a year. Perfumes o f various fragrances and alum were

used during and after washing, and various kinds o f

surgery were performed on the callouses and nails.

T h e physical process o f washing helped restore circulation. T he mummy was unwrapped, touched up, and put back to sleep with more preservatives added. T h e rest

o f the body was never washed at the same time as the

feet, for fear that one would become a pig in the next

life. Well-bred women were supposed to die o f shame

if men observed them washing their feet. T h e foot

consisted, after all, o f smelly, rotted flesh. This was

naturally not pleasing to the intruding male, a violation o f his aesthetic sensibility.

T h e art o f the shoes was basic to the sexual aesthetics o f the bound foot. Untold hours, days, months went into the embroidery o f shoes. T here were shoes

for all occasions, shoes o f different colors, shoes to

hobble in, shoes to go to bed in, shoes for special

occasions like birthdays, marriages, funerals, shoes

which denoted age. Red was the favored color for bed

shoes because it accentuated the whiteness o f the skin

o f the calves and thighs. A marriageable daughter made

about 12 pairs o f shoes as a part o f her dowry. She

presented 2 specially made pairs to her mother-in-law

and father-in-law. When she entered her husband’s

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home for the first time, her feet were immediately

examined by the whole family, neither praise nor

sarcasm being withheld.

There was also the art of the gait, the art of sitting,

the art of standing, the art of lying down, the art of adjusting the skirt, the art of every movement which involves feet. Beauty was the way feet looked and how

they moved. Certain feet were better than other feet,

more beautiful. Perfect 3-inch form and utter uselessness were the distinguishing marks of the aristocratic foot. These concepts of beauty and status defined

women: as ornaments, as sexual playthings, as sexual

constructs. The perfect construct, even in China, was

naturally the prostitute.

The natural-footed woman generated horror and

repulsion in China. She was anathema, and all the

forces o f insult and contempt were used to obliterate

her. Men said about bound feet and natural feet:

A tiny foot is proof of feminine goodness.. . .

Women who don’t bind their feet, look like men,

for the tiny foot serves to show the differentiation.. . .

The tiny foot is soft and, when rubbed, leads to

great excitement.. . .

The graceful walk gives the beholder mixed feelings o f compassion and pity.. . .

Natural feet are heavy and ponderous as they get

into bed, but tiny feet lightly steal under the coverlets.. . .

The large-footed woman is careless about adornment, but the tiny-footed frequently wash and apply a variety o f perfumed fragrances, enchanting all who

come into their presence.. . .

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T h e natural foot looks much less aesthetic in walk-

ing. . . .

Everyone welcomes the tiny foot, regarding its

smallness as precious.. . .

Men formerly so craved it that its possessor

achieved harmonious matrimony.. . .

Because o f its diminutiveness, it gives rise to a

variety o f sensual pleasures and love feelings.. . . 8

Thin, small, curved, soft, fragrant, weak, easily

inflamed, passive to the point o f being almost inanim ate—this was footbound woman. Her bindings created extraordinary vaginal folds; isolation in the bedroom increased her sexual desire; playing with the shriveled, crippled foot increased everyone’s desire.

Even the imagery o f the names o f various types o f foot

suggest, on the one hand, feminine passivity (lotuses,

lilies, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts) and, on the other

hand, male independence, strength, and mobility (lotus

boats, large-footed crows, monkey foot). It was unacceptable for a woman to have those male qualities denoted by large feet. This fact conjures up an earlier assertion: footbinding did not formalize existing differences between men and women —it created them.

One sex became male by virtue o f having made the

other sex some thing, something other, something

completely polar to itself, something called female.

In 1915, a satirical essay in defense o f footbinding,

written by a Chinese male, emphasized this:

T h e bound foot is the condition o f a life o f dignity

for man, o f contentment for woman. Let me make this

clear. I am a Chinese fairly typical o f my class. I pored

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too much over classic texts in my youth and dimmed

my eyes, narrowed my chest, crooked my back. My

memory is not strong, and in an old civilization there

is a vast deal to learn before you can know anything.

Accordingly among scholars I cut a poor figure. I am

timid, and my voice plays me false in gatherings of

men. But to my footbound wife, confined for life to

her house except when I bear her in my arms to her

palanquin, my stride is heroic, my voice is that o f a

roaring lion, my wisdom is of the sages. To her I am

the world; I am life itself. 9

Chinese men, it is clear, stood tall and strong on

women’s tiny feet.

The so-called art of footbinding was the process of

taking the human foot, using it as though it were insensible matter, molding it into an inhuman form. Footbinding was the “art” of making living matter insensible, inanimate. We are obviously not dealing here with art at all, but with fetishism, with sexual psychosis. This

fetish became the primary content of sexual experience

for an entire culture for 1,000 years. The manipulation

of the tiny foot was an indispensable prelude to all

sexual experience. Manuals were written elaborating

various techniques for holding and rubbing the Golden

Lotus. Smelling the feet, chewing them, licking them,

sucking them, all were sexually charged experiences.

A woman with tiny feet was supposedly more easily

maneuvered around in bed and this was no small advantage. Theft of shoes was commonplace. Women were forced to sew their shoes directly onto their bindings. Stolen shoes might be returned soaked in semen.

Prostitutes would show their naked feet for a high

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price (there weren’t many streetwalkers in China).

Drinking games using cups placed in the shoes o f prostitutes or courtesans were favorite pastimes. Tiny-footed prostitutes took special names like Moon Immortal, Red Treasure, Golden Pearl. No less numerous were the euphemisms for feet, shoes, and bindings.

Some men went to prostitutes to wash the tiny foot and

eat its dirt, or to drink tea made from the washing

water. Others wanted their penises manipulated by the

feet. Superstition also had its place —there was a belief

in the curative powers o f the water in which tiny feet

were washed.

Lastly, footbinding was the soil in which sadism

could grow and go unchecked —in which simple cruelty

could transcend itself, without much effort, into

atrocity. These are some typical horror stories o f those

times:

A stepmother or aunt in binding the child’s foot

was usually much harsher than the natural mother

would have been. An old man was described who delighted in seeing his daughters weep as the binding was tightly applied.. . . In one household, everyone

had to bind. T h e main wife and concubines bound to

the smallest degree, once morning and evening, and

once before retiring. T h e husband and first wife

strictly carried out foot inspections and whipped those

guilty o f having let the binding become loose. T h e

sleeping shoes were so painfully small that the women

had to ask the master to rub them in order to bring

relief. Another rich man would flog his concubines

on their tiny feet, one after another, until the blood

flowed. 10

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. . . about 1 9 3 1 . . . bound-foot women unable to Bee

had been taken captive. The bandits, angered because

o f their captives’ weak way o f walking and inability to

keep in file, forced the women to remove the bindings

and socks and run about barefoot. They cried out in

pain and were unable to move on in spite o f beatings.

Each o f the bandits grabbed a woman and forced her

to dance about on a wide field covered with sharp

rocks. The harshest treatment was meted out to prostitutes. Nails were driven through their hands and feet; they cried aloud for several days before expiring.

One form o f torture was to tie-up a woman so that her

legs dangled in midair and place bricks around each

toe, increasing the weight until the toes straightened

out and eventually dropped off. 11

END OF F O O T B I N D I N G E V E N T

One asks the same questions again and again, over

a period o f years, in the course of a lifetime. The questions have to do with people and what they do —the how and the why o f it. How could the Germans have murdered 6, 000, 000 Jews, used their skins for lampshades, taken the gold out of their teeth? How could white

people have bought and sold black people, hanged

them and castrated them? How could “Americans”

have slaughtered the Indian nations, stolen the land,

spread famine and disease? How can the Indochina

genocide continue, day after day, year after year?

How is it possible? Why does it happen?

As a woman, one is forced to ask another series of

hard questions: Why everywhere the oppression of

women throughout recorded history? How could the

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Inquisitors torture and bum women as witches? How

could men idealize the bound feet o f crippled women?

How and why?

T h e bound foot existed for 1, 000 years. In what

terms, using what measure, could one calculate the

enormity o f the crime, the dimensions o f the transgression, the amount o f cruelty and pain inherent in that 1, 000-year herstory? In what terms, using what

vocabulary, could one penetrate to the meaning, to the

reality, o f that 1, 000-year herstory?

Here one race did not war with another to acquire

food, or land, or civil power; one nation did not fight

with another in the interest o f survival, real or imagined; one group o f people in a fever pitch o f hysteria did not destroy another. None o f the traditional explanations or justifications for brutality between or among peoples applies to this situation. On the contrary, here one sex mutilated (enslaved) the other in the interest o f the art o f sex, male-female harmony, role-definition, beauty.

Consider the magnitude o f the crime.

Millions o f women, over a period o f 1,000 years,

were brutally crippled, mutilated, in the name o f

erotica.

Millions o f human beings, over a period o f 1, 000

years, were brutally crippled, mutilated, in the name

o f beauty.

Millions o f men, over a period o f 1, 000 years,

reveled in love-making devoted to the worship o f the

bound foot.

Millions o f men, over a period o f 1, 000 years, worshiped and adored the bound foot.

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Millions of mothers, over a period of 1, 000 years,

brutally crippled and mutilated their daughters for the

sake o f a secure marriage.

Millions of mothers, over a period of 1, 000 years,

brutally crippled and mutilated their daughters in the

name o f beauty.

But this thousand-year period is only the tip of

an awesome, fearful iceberg: an extreme and visible

expression of romantic attitudes, processes, and

values organically rooted in all cultures, then and

now. It demonstrates that man’s love for woman, his

sexual adoration of her, his human definition of her,

his delight and pleasure in her, require her negation:

physical crippling and psychological lobotomy. That is

the very nature of romantic love, which is the love based

on polar role definitions, manifest in herstory as well

as in fiction —he glories in her agony, he adores her

deformity, he annihilates her freedom, he will have her

as sex object, even if he must destroy the bones in her

feet to do it. Brutality, sadism, and oppression emerge

as the substantive core of the romantic ethos. That ethos

is the warp and woof of culture as we know it.

Women should be beautiful. All repositories of

cultural wisdom from King Solomon to King Hefner

agree: women should be beautiful. It is the reverence

for female beauty which informs the romantic ethos,

gives it its energy and justification. Beauty is transformed into that golden ideal, Beauty —rapturous and abstract. Women must be beautiful and Woman is

Beauty.

Notions o f beauty always incorporate the whole of a

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given societal structure, are crystallizations o f its values.

A society with a well-defined aristocracy will have aristocratic standards o f beauty. In Western “democracy”

notions o f beauty are “democratic” : even if a woman is

not born beautiful, she can make herself attractive.

T h e argument is not simply that some women are

not beautiful, therefore it is not fair to ju d ge women on

the basis o f physical beauty; or that men are not judged

on that basis, therefore women also should not be

judged on that basis; or that men should look for character in women; or that our standards o f beauty are too parochial in and o f themselves; or even that judgin g

women according to their conformity to a standard o f

beauty serves to make them into products, chattels,

differing from the farmer's favorite cow only in terms o f

literal form. The issue at stake is different, and crucial.

Standards o f beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body.

They prescribe her mobility, spontaneity, posture,

gait, the uses to which she can put her body. They define

precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom. And, o f

course, the relationship between physical freedom and

psychological development, intellectual possibility, and

creative potential is an umbilical one.

In our culture, not one part o f a woman’s body is

left untouched, unaltered. No feature or extremity is

spared the art, or pain, o f improvement. Hair is dyed,

lacquered, straightened, permanented; eyebrows are

plucked, penciled, dyed; eyes are lined, mascaraed,

shadowed; lashes are curled, or false —from head to

toe, every feature o f a woman's face, every section o f

her body, is subject to modification, alteration. This al

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teration is an ongoing, repetitive process. It is vital to

the economy, the major substance of male-female role

differentiation, the most immediate physical and psychological reality of being a woman. From the age of 11 or 12 until she dies, a woman will spend a large part

of her time, money, and energy on binding, plucking,

painting, and deodorizing herself. It is commonly and

wrongly said that male transvestites through the use of

makeup and costuming caricature the women they

would become, but any real knowledge of the romantic

ethos makes clear that these men have penetrated to the

core experience of being a woman, a romanticized construct.

The technology of beauty, and the message it carries, is handed down from mother to daughter. Mother teaches daughter to apply lipstick, to shave under her

arms, to bind her breasts, to wear a girdle and high-

heeled shoes. Mother teaches daughter concomitantly

her role, her appropriate behavior, her place. Mother

teaches daughter, necessarily, the psychology which

defines womanhood: a woman must be beautiful, in

order to please the amorphous and amorous Him. What

we have called the romantic ethos operates as vividly

in 20th-century Amerika and Europe as it did in 10th-

century China.

This cultural transfer o f technology, role, and psychology virtually affects the emotive relationship between mother and daughter. It contributes substantially to the ambivalent love-hate dynamic o f that relationship.

What must the Chinese daughter/child have felt toward

the mother who bound her feet? What does any daughter/child feel toward the mother who forces her to do

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painful things to her own body? T h e mother takes on

the role o f enforcer: she uses seduction, command, all

manner o f force to coerce the daughter to conform to

the demands o f the culture. It is because this role becomes her dominant role in the mother-daughter relationship that tensions and difficulties between mothers and daughters are so often unresolvable. T h e daughter

who rejects the cultural norms enforced by the mother

is forced to a basic rejection o f her own mother, a recognition o f the hatred and resentment she felt toward that mother, an alienation from mother and society

so extreme that her own womanhood is denied by both.

T h e daughter who internalizes those values and endorses those same processes is bound to repeat the teaching she was taught —her anger and resentment remain subterranean, channeled against her own female offspring as well as her mother.

Pain is an essential part o f the grooming process,

and that is not accidental. Plucking the eyebrows,

shaving under the arms, wearing a girdle, learning to

walk in high-heeled shoes, having one’s nose fixed,

straightening or curling one’s hair —these things hurt.

The pain, o f course, teaches an important lesson: no

price is too great, no process too repulsive, no operation

too painful for the woman who would be beautiful.

The tolerance of pain and the romanticization of that tolerance begins here, in preadolescence, in socialization, and serves to prepare women for lives o f childbearing, self-abnegation, and husband-pleasing. The adolescent

experience o f the “pain o f being a woman” casts the

feminine psyche into a masochistic mold and forces

the adolescent to conform to a self-image which bases