Not wanting to die, and knowing the sadism of men, knowing what men can do in the name of sex, in the fuck, for the sake of pleasure, for the sake of power, knowing torture, having been able to predict all the prisons from her place in the bedroom and the brothel, knowing how callous men are to those less than themselves, knowing the fist, bondage, the farming fuck and the brothel fuck, seeing the indifference of men to human freedom, seeing the enthusiasm of men for diminishing others through physical domination, seeing the invisibility of women to men, seeing the absolute disregard of humanity in women by men, seeing the disdain of men for women’s lives, and not wanting to die—and not wanting to die—women propose two very different solutions for themselves in relation to men and this man’s world.
The first honors the sexual and reproductive imperatives of men. This is the right-wing solution, though those who pursue it are— in terms of male-defined politics—all along the political spectrum from far Right to far Left. In this solution, women accept the definition of their sex class, and within the terms of that definition fight for crumbs of self-respect and social, economic, and creative worth. Socialist movements and revolutions are predicated on an acceptance of this sex-class definition, as are right-wing movements and counterinsurgencies. The far-Right expression of this solution is usually highly religious, and it is the religious idiom that makes it distinguishable from other expressions of what is essentially the same accommodation to male power. Specifically, the sex-class accommodation is seen as a function of religious orthodoxy: in accommodating, women are faithful to a divine father; women accept traditional religious descriptions of women, female sexuality, and female nature; women accept the duties of sexual and reproductive submission to men. The far-Right solution translates the presumed biological destiny of women into a politics of orthodox religion: even in a secular republic, far-Right women live in a theocracy. Religion shrouds women in real as well as magical grace in that the sex-class functions of women are formally honored, carefully spelled out, and exploited within clear and prescribed boundaries.
The second solution is offered by feminists. It proposes, in the words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “the individuality of each human soul... In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny... ”13 This is simply a recognition of the human condition, in which women are included. It is also the precondition for the realization of Marx’s greatest ethical idea: from each according to her ability, to each according to her need. It is the imposition of the sex-class definition of women on women—by any means necessary—that devastates the human capacities of women, making them men’s subordinates, making them “women. ” Feminists have a vision of women, even women, as individual human beings; and this vision annihilates the system of gender polarity in which men are superior and powerful. This is not a bourgeois notion of individuality; it is not a self-indulgent notion of individuality; it is the recognition that every human being lives a separate life in a separate body and dies alone. In proposing “the individuality of each human soul, ” feminists propose that women are not their sex; nor their sex plus some other little thing—a liberal additive of personality, for instance; but that each life—including each woman’s life—must be a person’s own, not predetermined before her birth by totalitarian ideas about her nature and her function, not subject to guardianship by some more powerful class, not determined in the aggregate but worked out by herself, for herself. Frankly, no one much knows what feminists mean; the idea of women not defined by sex and reproduction is anathema or baffling. It is the simplest revolutionary idea ever conceived, and the most despised.
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