Right Wing Women

7mo

No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.

Despite all the happy talk of the total women, there is a fierce anxiety there: if men did not need babies, and women to have them, these bright wives would be shivering on street corners like the other fast fucks. Her womb is her wealth; her use in childbearing is his strongest tie to her; she holds his [sic] children, actual and potential, hostage, for her own sake.

Reklam

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7mo

Most women, holding on for dear life, do not dare abandon blind faith. From father’s house to husband’s house to a grave that still might not be her own, a woman acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protection from male violence. She conforms, in order to be as safe as she can be. Sometimes it is a lethargic conformity, in which case male demands slowly close in on her, as if she were a character buried alive in an Edgar Allan Poe story. Sometimes it is a militant conformity. She will save herself by proving that she is loyal, obedient, useful, even fanatic in the service of the men around her. She is the happy hooker, the happy homemaker, the exemplary Christian, the pure academic, the perfect comrade, the terrorist par excellence. Whatever the values, she will embody them with a perfect fidelity. The males rarely keep their part of the bargain as she understands it: protection from male violence against her person. But the militant conformist has given so much of herself—her labor, heart, soul, often her body, often children—that this betrayal is akin to nailing the coffin shut; the corpse is beyond caring.

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6mo

Homophobia, like anti-Semitism, is not an idea; it is a passion. For women, hatred of homosexuals— despised because they are associated with women—is more than self-defeating; it is almost breathtakingly suicidal, encouraging as it does the continuing hatred of anything or anyone associated with women. But the perception that having children is the only edge women have on survival at the hands of men is right; it is an acute perception, grounded in an accurate reading of what women are for and how women are used by men in this sexual system. Without reproduction, women as a class have nothing. In sorrow or not, bearing babies is what women can do that men need—really need, no handjob can substitute here; and homosexuality makes women afraid, irrationally, passionately afraid, of extinction: of being unnecessary as a class, as women, to men who destroy whatever they do not need and whose impulses toward women are murderous anyway.

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7mo

Wives were the majority, whores the minority, prostitution the condition of each, rape the underbelly of prostitution.

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6mo

In general, the euphemisms of religion and romantic love keep women from ever recognizing the farming model as having to do directly and personally with them. Modern women do not think of themselves as cows, nor as land that the man seeds; but maleheaded marriage incorporates both these vivid traditions of female definition; and the laws have been built on these same images and ideas of what women are for; and the real history of women has had as its center the actual use of women as cows and as land. The way women are treated, valued, and used has remarkably little in common with how women perceive themselves. The legend says that vampires cannot see themselves in mirrors, but in this case the vampires’ victims cannot see themselves: what would stare back— the cow, the land, the uterus, the crop, the plowing, the planting, the harvest, being put out to pasture, going dry—would annihilate the delusion of individuality that keeps most women going. The laws that made women chattel derived from an analogy between women and cows that hundreds of centuries of men found apt, and the sexual slur was apparently a neutral observation infused with the spleen of the moment—she’s a cow. The idea that the male plants and the woman is planted in originates in antiquity, and Marcuse among others has reiterated the idea that woman is the land in more modern times. The farming model is not discussed as such, even among feminists. It too clearly reveals the hopeless impersonality, degradation, and futility implicit in women’s subordinate position.