female rage

I think that we have been wrong to say that prostitution is a metaphor for what happens to all women. I think that homelessness really is that metaphor. I think that women are dispossessed of a place to live that is safe, that belongs to the woman herself, a place in which she has not just sovereignty over her own body but sovereignty over her actual social life, whether it is life in a family or among friends.

Pornography is the orchestrated destruction of womens bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny.

The internal mechanism of female masochism must be rooted out from the inside before women will ever know what it is to be free.

We are despised, as a gender class, as sluts and liars. We are the victims of continuous, malevolent, and sanctioned violence against us—against our bodies and our whole lives. Our enemies—rapists and their defenders—not only go unpunished; they remain influential arbiters of morality; they have high and esteemed places in the society; they are priests, lawyers, judges, lawmakers, politicians, doctors, artists, corporation executives, psychiatrists, and teachers.

Women have wanted intercourse to work and have submitted—with regret or with enthusiasm, real or faked—even though or even when it does not. The reasons have often been foul, filled with the spiteful but carefully hidden malice of the powerless. Women have needed what can be gotten through intercourse: the economic and psychological survival; access to male power through access to the male who has it; having some hold—psychological, sexual, or economic—on the ones who act, who decide, who matter.

Pain is an essential part of 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, of 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 of childbearing, self-abnegation, and husband-pleasing.

Intercourse may not cause women’s orgasm or even have much of a correlation with it—indeed, we rarely find intercourse and orgasm in the same place at the same time—but intercourse and women’s inequality are like Siamese twins, always in the same place at the same time pissing in the same pot.

To become the object, she takes herself and transforms herself into a thing: all freedoms are diminished and she is caged, even in the cage docile, sometimes physically maimed, movement is limited: she physically becomes the thing he wants to fuck. It is especially in the acceptance of object status that her humanity is hurt: it is a metaphysical acceptance of lower status in sex and in society; an implicit acceptance of less freedom, less privacy, less integrity.

“And on that day, that day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can't begin it before that day. Before that day it means nothing because it is nothing: it is not real; it is not true. But on that day it becomes real.”

“Everything that you have been taught about the liberal tradition of education, about the value of books, the beauty of art, the meaning of creativity, is lost, means nothing, unless you retain the independence to ask your own questions, always, throughout your lives. And it is easier now than it will be in ten years, and it is easier now than it will be when you are fifty or sixty or seventy.

The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.

The new pornography is left-wing; and the newpornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.

Often, to keep the family together, the woman will accept repeated beatings and rapes, emotional battering and verbal degredation; she will be debased and ashamed but she will stick it out, or when she runs he will kill her.

Critiques of rape, pornography, and prostitution are “sex-negative” without qualification or examination, perhaps because so many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid, and without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste.