“Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships. It is as if our oppression were cast in lava eons ago and now it is granite, and each individual woman is buried inside the stone. Women try to survive inside the stone, buried in it. Women say, I like this stone, its weight is not too heavy for me. Women defend the stone by saying that it protects them from rain and wind and fire. Women say, all I have ever known is this stone, what is there without it?
For some women, being buried in the stone is unbearable. They want to move freely. They exert all their strength to claw away at the hard rock that encases them. They rip their fingernails, bruise their fists, tear the skin on their hands until it is raw and bleeding. They rip their lips open on the rock, and break their teeth, and choke on the granite as it crumbles into their mouths. Many women die in this desperate, solitary battle against the stone.
But what if the impulse to freedom were to be born in all of the women buried in the stone? What if the material of the rock itself had become so saturated with the stinking smell of women’s rotting bodies, the accumulated stench of thousands of years of decay and death, that no woman could contain her repulsion? What would those women do if, finally, they did want to be free?I think that they would study the stone.
I think that they would use every mental and physical faculty available to them to analyze the stone, its structure, its qualities, its nature, its chemical composition, its density, the physical laws which determine its properties. They would try to discover where it was eroded, what substances could decompose it, what kind of pressure was required to shatter it.
This investigation would require absolute rigor and honesty. Any lie that they told themselves about the nature of the stone would impede their liberation. Any lie that they told themselves about their own condition inside the stone would perpetuate the very situation that had become intolerable to them.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics
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