k
Kuram
Ours has always been the gender of endurance, of courage, of resistance. Not that we had a choice.
True courage. Facing up to what is new. Possible. Better. Employment is collapsing? The family is imploding? Good! This automatically challenges notions of masculinity. More good news. We’ve already had enough of this shit.
Feminism is a revolution, not a restructuring of marketing guidelines, not some vague promotion for cocksucking or partner-swapping, this is not just about increasing supplementary income. Feminism is a collective venture, for women, for men, and others. A revolution that is well underway. A vision of the world, a choice. It’s not about pitting the miserable gains by women against the miserable gains by men, it’s about blowing the whole fucking thing sky-high.
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After several years of diligent, genuine research, I finally came to a conclusion: womanhood is whoredom. The art of ass-licking. You can dress it up as seduction, tart it up as glamour. It’s not exactly a sport that requires great skill. For the most part, it just means behaving like you’re inferior. Walk into a room, check to see whether there are any men present, do your best to please them. Don’t talk too loud. Don’t make categorical statements. Don’t spread your legs and get comfortable when you sit down. Don’t be peremptory. Don’t talk about money. Don’t hanker after power. Don’t seek a position of authority. Don’t strive for glory. Don’t laugh too loud. Don’t be too funny. Pleasing men is a complex art that involves erasing everything that concerns power.
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Being neurotic, now that’s feminine. Selfeffacing. A good listener. Not a brilliant intellectual. Just clever enough to understand what some foppish dickhead is talking about. Gossiping is feminine. Anything that doesn’t leave a trace.
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We are expected to play down our power, a trait that is never prized in women: “competent” still means “masculine.”
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Yes, we had been outside, in a space that was not ours. Yes, we had lived rather than died. Yes, we’d been wearing miniskirts, on our own, with no guy, in the middle of the night. Yes, we’d been dumb, and weak, unable to smash their faces, weak in the way girls are taught to be when they’re assaulted. Yes, it had happened to us, but for the first time we recognized what we had done: we had gone out because there was jack shit to do staying home with Mummy and Daddy. We had taken the risk, we had paid the price, and instead of feeling ashamed that we were still alive, we could decide to pick ourselves up and get over it as best we could. Paglia made it possible for us to see ourselves as warriors, no longer personally at fault for something we’d apparently been begging for, but ordinary victims of a crime that women should expect to have to face if they decide to venture outside. Paglia was the first person to extricate rape from utter nightmare, from being unmentionable, a thing that must never be allowed to happen. She turned it into a political event, something we had to learn to get through. Paglia changed everything: rape was no longer something to deny, something to be crushed by, but something to live with.
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Men don’t want to hear about it. Desire is their exclusive preserve. It’s extraordinary to think a young girl screaming her passion as John Lennon plays his guitar is despised while an old codger wolf-whistling at a teenager in a miniskirt is considered a game old boy.
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Perfect little girls, virtuous housewives, and devoted mothers, roles constructed for the benefit of others, not to sound our own depths. We are programmed to avoid all contact with our wild side. First and foremost, be amenable, focus on the other person’s pleasure. If that means suppressing much of ourselves, too bad. Our sexuality is dangerous, to acknowledge it might lead to exploring it, and for a woman, all sexual exploration leads to being excluded from the group.
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Considered taboo, inconceivable until quite recently, the idea of the female orgasm did not appear in everyday language until the 1970s. It was quickly turned against women in two different ways. Firstly, by telling women that if they did not have an orgasm, they were failures. Frigidity became almost synonymous with barrenness. But a woman failing to have an orgasm is not like male impotence: a frigid woman is not sterile. Nor is she incapable of sensuality. But instead of being regarded as a possibility, the female orgasm quickly became an imperative. That’s the thing about women, we always need to be made to feel we’re incompetent … Secondly, because men instantly appropriated the female orgasm: they are the means by which a woman should come. Female masturbation is still considered shameful, secondary. The orgasm we’re supposed to have is one bestowed on us by a man.
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It’s astonishing, in 2006, when half the world is walking around with microcomputers in their pockets—cam-eras, smartphones, PDAs, MP3 playersthat no one’s invented a device that you can stick inside your pussy before you head out that will mangle the prick of the first bastard who tries to slip it inside you. Maybe the idea of making it impossible to access a woman’s genitals by force is undesirable. It’s crucial that a woman be open, and terrified. Otherwise, how would you define masculinity?
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The true history of porn, what creates and defines it, is censorship. The moment something is banned from the screen, it crops up in pornography, making it an interesting experiment in circumvention.
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