femalethink

[femalethink]

We have here a complete denial by blacks (and women, no less) of their own principles of Black Power as applied to another group: the right of the oppressed to organize around their oppression as they see and define it. It is sad that the Black Power movement, which taught women so much about their political needs through the obvious parallels, should be the last to see that parallel in reverse. Grass-roots organizing, around one’s own oppression, the end of leadership and power plays, the need for a mass base prior to bloody struggle, all the most important principles of radical politics suddenly do not apply to women, in a double standard of the worst order.

—Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.”

[femalethink]

These ‘reformers’, the women ‘radicals’ of their day, were at best influenced by feminism. They were neither true feminists nor true radicals because they did not yet see the woman’s cause as a legitimate radical issue in itself. By seeing the Women's Rights Movement as only tangent to another, more important politics, they were in a sense viewing themselves as defective men: women’s issues seemed to them ‘special’, ‘sectarian’, while issues that concerned men were ‘human’, ‘universal’. Developing politically in movements dominated by men, they became preoccupied with reforming their position within those movements rather than getting out and creating their own.

—Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.”

[femalethink]

Sex class is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear as a superficial inequality, one that can be solved by merely a few reforms, or perhaps by the full integration of women into the labour force. But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child – ‘That? Why you can’t change that! You must be out of your mind!’ – is the closest to the truth. We are talking about something every bit as deep as that. This gut reaction – the assumption that, even when they don’t know it, feminists are talking about changing a fundamental biological condition – is an honest one. That so profound a change cannot be easily fitted into traditional categories of thought, e.g., ‘political’, is not because these categories do not apply but because they are not big enough: radical feminism bursts through them. If there were another word more all-embracing than revolution we would use it.

—Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.”

[femalethink]

He had no crippling doubts about his role, nor about the function and value of marriage. To him it was simply an economic arrangement of some selfish benefit, one that would most easily satisfy his physical needs and reproduce his heirs. His wife, too, was clear about her duties and rewards: ownership of herself and of her full sexual, psychological, and housekeeping services for a lifetime, in return for long-term patronage and protection by a member of the ruling class, and—in her turn—limited control over the children until they reached a certain age. Today this contract based on divided roles has been so disguised by sentiment that it goes completely unrecognized by millions of newly-weds, and even by most older married couples.

—Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.”

[femalethink]

The contemporary radical feminist position is the direct descendant of the radical feminist line in the old movement, notably that championed by Stanton and Anthony, and later by the militant Congressional Union subsequently known as the Woman’s Party. It sees feminist issues not only as women’s first priority, but as central to any larger revolutionary analysis. It refuses to accept the existing leftist analysis not because it is too radical, but because it is not radical enough: it sees the current leftist analysis as outdated and superficial, because this analysis does not relate the structure of the economic class system to its origins in the sexual class system, the model for all other exploitative systems, and thus the tapeworm that must be eliminated first by any true revolution.

—Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.”

[femalethink]

The 1970s women's movement made its most substantial progress on the twin fronts of employment and fertility—forging historic and record numbers of equal employment and anti-discrimination policies, forcing open the doors to lucrative and elite "male" professions, and ultimately helping to legalize abortion. And now, once again, as the backlash crests and breaks, it crashes hardest on these two shores—dismantling the federal apparatus for enforcing equal opportunity, gutting crucial legal rulings for working women, undermining abortion rights, halting birth control research, and promulgating "fetal protection" and "fetal rights" policies that have shut women out of lucrative jobs, caused them to undergo invasive obstetric surgeries against their will, and thrown "bad" mothers in jail.

—Susan Faludi, “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.”

[femalethink]

The truth, not fully recognised even by those anxious to do good to woman, is that she, like the labour-classes, is in an oppressed condition; that her position, like theirs, is one of merciless degradation. Women are the creatures of an organised tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organised tyranny of idlers. Even where this much is grasped, we must never be weary of insisting on the non-understanding that for women, as for the labouring classes, no solution of the difficulties and problems that present themselves is really possible in the present condition of society. All that is done, heralded with no matter what flourish of trumpets, is palliative, not remedial. Both the oppressed classes, women and the immediate producers, must understand that their emancipation will come from themselves. Women will find allies in the better sort of men, as the labourers are finding allies among the philosophers, artists, and poets. But the one has nothing to hope from man as a whole, and the other has nothing to hope from the middle class as a whole.

—Eleanor Marx, “The Woman Question.”

[femalethink]

“Girls learn to love and have sexual feelings in a position of low status, and the eroticization of powerlessness is a normal part of the construction of femininity.”

-Sheila Jeffreys, Unpacking Queer Politics

[femalethink]

Women have been chattels to men as wives, as prostitutes, as sexual and reproductive servants. Being owned and being fucked are or have been virtually synonymous experiences in the lives of women. He owns you; he fucks you. The fucking conveys the quality of the ownership: he owns you inside out. The fucking conveys the passion of his dominance: it requires access to every hidden inch. He can own everything around you and everything on you and everything you are capable of doing as a worker or servant or ornament; but getting inside you and owning your insides is possession: deeper, more intimate, than any other kind of ownership. Intimate, raw, total, the experience of sexual possession for women is real and literal, without any magical or mystical dimension to it: getting fucked and being owned are inseparably the same; together, being one and the same, they are sex for women under male dominance as a social system.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[femalethink]

There is the generalized, traditional fear of female sexuality. Further, there is discomfort with the similarity, with the common origin, of the female clitoris and the male penis. Women are used to hearing the clitoris described as an "undeveloped penis"; men are not used to thinking of the penis as an overdeveloped clitoris. Finally, and most seriously, there is a profound psychological and institutional reluctance to face the repercussions of the fact that the female clitoris is the only organ in the human body whose purpose is exclusively that of erotic stimulation and release. What does this mean? It means that for the human female, alone among all earth's life-forms, sexuality and reproduction are not inseparable. It is the male penis, carrier of both semen and sexual response, that is simultaneously procreative and erotic. If we wanted to reduce one of the sexes to a purely reproductive function, on the basis of its anatomy (we don't), it would be the male sex that qualified for such a reduction, not the female. Not the human female.

But these are only biological facts. These are only biological realities. As we know, facts and realities can be, and are, systematically ignored in the service of established ideologies. Throughout the world today virtually all religious, cultural, economic, and political institutions stand, where they were built centuries ago, on the solid foundation of an erroneous concept. A concept that assumes the psychic passivity, the creative inferiority, and the sexual secondariness of women. This enshrined concept states that men exist to create the human world, while women exist to reproduce humans. Period. If we argue that data exists—not solely biological, but archaeological, mythological, anthropological, and historical data—which refutes the universality of this erroneous concept, we are told to shut up; because something called "God" supports the erroneous concept, and that's all that matters. That's the final word.

—Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, "The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth."

[femalethink]

Male dominance has in fact had the cachet of being both natural and divine. Evolutionists, for instance, canned God but not the essential male and female he created and not intercourse as he intended it: male with female; active and passive. They found secular, science-saturated arguments to support the same arrangement of human reality. Even without a belief in God, nature is what God made the way he made it. Crimes against nature, then, have been crimes against God: direct hits on him.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[femalethink]

There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely learns them all, even in one's native language. There are dirty names for every female part of her body and for every way of touching her. There are dirty words, dirty laughs, dirty noises, dirty jokes, dirty movies, and dirty things to do to her in the dark. Fucking her is the dirtiest, though it may not be as dirty as she herself is. Her genitals are dirty in the literal meaning: stink and blood and urine and mucous and slime. Her genitals are also dirty in the metaphoric sense: obscene. She is reviled as filthy, obscene, in religion, pornography, philosophy, and in most literature and art and psychology.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[femalethink]

The men as a body politic have power over women and decide how women will suffer: which sadistic acts against the bodies of women will be construed to be normal. In the United States, incest is increasingly the sadism of choice, the intercourse itself wounding the female child and socializing her to her female status-early; perhaps a sexual response to the political rebellion of adult women; a tyranny to destroy the potential for rebellion. "I felt like I was being ripped up the middle of my legs all the way to my throat," one incest victim said. "I was sure that if I opened my eyes and looked down, I would be in two parts on the bed." This too is genital mutilation—with the penis doing the cutting. Perhaps incestuous rape is becoming a central paradigm for intercourse in our time. Women are supposed to be small and childlike, in looks, in rights; child prostitution keeps increasing in mass and in legitimacy, the children sexually used by a long chain of men-fathers, uncles, “grandfathers, brothers, pimps, pornographers, and the good citizens who are the consumers; and men, who are, after all, just family, are supposed to slice us up the middle, leaving us in parts on the bed.”

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[femalethink]

In Amerika, there is the nearly universal conviction—or so it appears—that sex (fucking) is good and that liking it is right: morally right; a sign of human health; nearly a standard for citizenship. Even those who believe in original sin and have a theology of hellfire and damnation express the Amerikan creed, an optimism that glows in the dark: sex is good, healthy, wholesome, pleasant, fun; we like it, we enjoy it, we want it, we are cheerful about it; it is as simple as we are, the citizens of this strange country with no memory and no mind.

The current argument on sex between the Right and the Left is not about the nature of fucking as such. It is strictly about whether or not this good thing is good outside marriage or between persons of the same gender (however they manage it). "In other words," writes Marabel Morgan, interpreting Scripture no less, "sex is for the marriage relationship only, but within those bounds, anything goes. Sex is as clean and pure as eating cottage cheese." Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman (a manual for wives who want to get their husbands to fuck them and maintain a cheerful attitude and a belief in God all at the same time) spawned classes all over the United States, including in churches, to teach conservative, Christian women how to act out the so-called fantasies of their husbands with costumes and props. The Left prefers many partners to one; and Hustler's meat-grinder cover, in which a woman is fed into a meat grinder and comes out as ground beef, expresses its food preference. On both Right and Left, a citizen had best be prepared to affirm her loyalty to the act itself. Ambivalence or dissent impugns her credibility; a good attitude is requisite before she is allowed to speak—in magazines, on television, in political groups. The tone and general posture of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders set the standard for a good attitude; not to have one is un-Amerikan and sick too. The social pressure to conform is fierce, ubiquitous, and self-righteous.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[femalethink]

Intercourse both presumes and requires a society of at least two persons before it can occur at all; and the state is concerned about the nature of that society—how it is constructed, that it be hierarchical, that it be male-dominant. In each act of intercourse, a society is formed; and the distribution of power in that society is the state interest at stake. Who constitutes the society, what each does, the place of each in each act, the value of each, is what the state seeks to control. Gender is what the state seeks to control: who is the man here? which is the woman? how to keep the man on top, how to keep the man the man; how to render the woman inferior in fucking so that she cannot recover herself from the carnal experience of her own subjugation.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[femalethink]

The penis needs the protection of the law, of awe, of power. Rebellion here, in intercourse, is the death of a system of gender hierarchy premised on a sexual victory over the vagina. The triumphant fuck is virtually synonymous with masculinity. The legitimacy of a man's civil dominance depends on the authenticity of his masculinity, which is articulated when he fucks. Masculinity itself means being as differentiated from women as it is possible to be; and so the laws regulating intercourse in general forbid those sex acts that break down gender barriers and license those sex acts and conditions that heighten gender polarity and antagonism. The laws that say who to fuck, when, how, and anatomically where keep the man differentiated in a way that seems absolute. Having power, one can break the law for pleasure; but the law itself is the mechanism for creating and maintaining power.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[femalethink]

The prejudices that mount against women as they grow older are an important arm of male privilege. It is the present unequal distribution of adult roles between the two sexes that gives men a freedom to age denied to women. Men actively administer the double standard about aging because the "masculine" role awards them the initiative in courtship. Men choose; women are chosen. So men choose younger women. But although this system of inequality is operated by men, it could not work if women themselves did not acquiesce in it. Women reinforce it powerfully with their complacency, with their anguish, with their lies.

—Susan Sontag, “On Women.”