in their real lives, have tried to understand, struggle against,
and transform the political system called patriarchy which
exploits our labor, predetermines the ownership of our bodies,
and diminishes our selfhood from the day we are bom. This
struggle has no dimension to it which is abstract: it has
touched us in every part of our lives. But nowhere has it
touched us more vividly or painfully than in that part of our
human lives which we call “love” and “sex. ” In the course of
our struggle to free ourselves from systematic oppression, a
serious argument has developed among us, and I want to bring
that argument into this room.
Some of us have committed ourselves in all areas, including
those called “love” and “sex, ” to the goal of equality, that is,
to the state of being equal; correspondence in quantity, degree, value, rank, ability; uniform character, as of motion or surface. Others of us, and I stand on this side of the argument,
do not see equality as a proper, or sufficient, or moral, or
honorable final goal. We believe that to be equal where there
is not universal justice, or where there is not universal freedom is, quite simply, to be the same as the oppressor. It is to have achieved “uniform character, as of motion or surface. ”
Nowhere is this clearer than in the area of sexuality. The
male sexual model is based on a polarization of humankind
into man /woman, master/slave, aggressor/victim, active/
passive. This male sexual model is now many thousands of
years old. The very identity of men, their civil and economic
power, the forms of government that they have developed, the
wars they wage, are tied irrevocably together. All forms of
dominance and submission, whether it be man over woman,
white over black, boss over worker, rich over poor, are tied
irrevocably to the sexual identities of men and are derived
from the male sexual model. Once we grasp this, it becomes
clear that in fact men own the sex act, the language which
describes sex, the women whom they objectify. Men have written the scenario for any sexual fantasy you have ever had or any sexual act you have ever engaged in.
There is no freedom or justice in exchanging the female
role for the male role. There is, no doubt about it, equality.
There is no freedom or justice in using male language, the
language of your oppressor, to describe sexuality. There is no
freedom or justice or even common sense in developing a
male sexual sensibility— a sexual sensibility which is aggressive, competitive, objectifying, quantity oriented. There is only equality. To believe that freedom or justice for women,
or for any individual woman, can be found in mimicry of male
sexuality is to delude oneself and to contribute to the oppression of one’s sisters.
Many of us would like to think that in the last four years, or
ten years, we have reversed, or at least impeded, those habits
and customs of the thousands of years which went before— the
habits and customs of male dominance. There is no fact or
figure to bear that out. You may feel better, or you may not,
but statistics show that women are poorer than ever, that
women are raped more and murdered more. I want to suggest
to you that a commitment to sexual equality with males, that
is, to uniform character as of motion or surface, is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered. I want to ask you to make a different commitment— a commitment to the abolition of poverty, rape, and murder; that is, a commitment to ending the system of oppression called patriarchy; to ending the male sexual model itself.
The real core of the feminist vision, its revolutionary kernel
if you will, has to do with the abolition of all sex roles— that
is, an absolute transformation of human sexuality and the institutions derived from it. In this work, no part of the male sexual model can possibly apply. Equality within the framework of the male sexual model, however that model is reformed or modified, can only perpetuate the model itself and the injustice and bondage which are its intrinsic consequences.
I suggest to you that transformation of the male sexual
model under which we now all labor and “love” begins where
there is a congruence, not a separation, a congruence of feeling and erotic interest; that it begins in what we do know about female sexuality as distinct from male— clitoral touch
and sensitivity, multiple orgasms, erotic sensitivity all over the
body (which needn’t— and shouldn’t—be localized or contained genitally), in tenderness, in self-respect and in absolute mutual respect. For men I suspect that this transformation
begins in the place they most dread— that is, in a limp penis. I
think that men will have to give up their precious erections
and begin to make love as women do together. I am saying
that men will have to renounce their phallocentric personalities, and the privileges and powers given to them at birth as a consequence of their anatomy, that they will have to excise
everything in them that they now value as distinctively “male. ”
No reform, or matching of orgasms, will accomplish this.
I have been reading excerpts from the diary of Sophie Tolstoy, which I found in a beautiful book called Revelations: Diaries of Women, edited by Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter. Sophie Tolstoy wrote: And the main thing is not to love. See what I have done by loving him so deeply! It is so painful and humiliating; but he thinks that it is merely silly. “You say one thing and always do another. ”
But what is the good of arguing in this superior manner, when
I have nothing in me but this humiliating love and a bad temper;
and these two things have been the cause of all my misfortunes,
for my temper has always interfered with my love. I want nothing but his love and sympathy, and he won’t give it to me; and all my pride is trampled in the mud; I am nothing but a miser
able crushed worm, whom no one wants, whom no one loves, a
useless creature with morning sickness, and a big belly, two rotten teeth, and a bad temper, a battered sense of dignity, and a love which nobody wants and which nearly drives me insane. 2
Does anyone really think that things have changed so much
since Sophie Tolstoy made that entry in her diary on October
25, 1886? And what would you tell her if she came here
today, to her sisters? Would you have handed her a vibrator
and taught her how to use it? Would you have given her the
techniques of fellatio that might better please Mr. Tolstoy?
Would you have suggested to her that her salvation lay in
becoming a “sexual athlete”? Learning to cruise? Taking as
many lovers as Leo did? Would you tell her to start thinking
of herself as a “person” and not as a woman?
Or might you have found the courage, the resolve, the conviction to be her true sisters—to help her to extricate herself from the long darkness of Leo’s shadow; to join with her in
changing the very organization and texture of this world, still
constructed in 1974 to serve him, to force her to serve him?
I suggest to you that Sophie Tolstoy is here today, in the
bodies and lives of many sisters. Do not fail her.
3
R em em bering the W itches
I dedicate this talk to Elizabeth Gould Davis, author of The
; First Sex, who several months ago killed herself and who toward the end of her life was a victim of rape; to Anne Sexton, poet, who killed herself on October 4, 1974; to Inez Garcia,
thirty years old, wife and mother, who was a few weeks ago
sentenced in California to five years to life imprisonment for
killing the three-hundred-pound man who held her down while
another man raped her; and to Eva Diamond, twenty-six years
old, whose child was taken from her five years ago when she
was declared an unfit mother because she was convicted of
welfare fraud and who several months ago was sentenced in
Minnesota to fifteen years in prison for killing her husband of
one year while he was attempting to beat her to death.
Delivered at New York City chapter meeting of the National Organization
for Women, October 3 1 , 1974.
We are here tonight to talk about gynocide. Gynocide is the
systematic crippling, raping, and/or killing of women by men.
Gynocide is the word that designates the relentless violence
perpetrated by the gender class men against the gender class
women.
For instance, Chinese footbinding is an example of gynocide. For one thousand years in China all women were systematically crippled so that they would be passive, erotic objects for men; so that they were carnal property; so that they were entirely dependent on men for food, water, shelter, and
clothing; so that they could not walk, or walk away, or unite
against the sadism of their male oppressors.
Another example of gynocide is the systematic rape of the
women of Bangladesh. There, the rape of women was part of
the military strategy of the male invading armies. As many of
you know, it is estimated that between 200, 000 and 400, 000
women were raped by the invading soldiers and when the war
was over, those women were considered unclean by their husbands, brothers, and fathers, and were left to whore, starve, and die. The Bangladesh gynocide was perpetrated first by the
men who invaded Bangladesh, and then by those who lived
there— the husbands, brothers, and fathers: it was perpetrated
by the gender class men against the gender class women.
Tonight, on Halloween, we are here to remember another
gynocide, the mass slaughter of the nine million women who
were called witches. These women, our sisters, were killed
over a period of three hundred years in Germany, Spain, Italy,
France, Holland, Switzerland, England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and Amerika. They were killed in the name of God the Father and His only Son, Jesus Christ.
The organized persecution of the witches began officially on
December 9, 1484. Pope Innocent VIII named two Dominican monks, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, as Inquisitors and asked the good fathers to define witchcraft, to isolate the modus operandi of the witches, and to standardize trial
procedures and sentencing. Kramer and Sprenger wrote a text
called the Malleus Maleficarum. The Malleus Maleficarum
was high Catholic theology and working Catholic jurisprudence. It might be compared to the Amerikan Constitution. It was the law. Anyone who challenged it was guilty of heresy, a
capital crime. Anyone who refuted its authority or questioned
its credibility on any level was guilty of heresy, a capital crime.
Before I discuss the content of the Malleus Maleficarum, I
want to be clear about the statistical information that we do
have on the witches. The total figure of nine million is a moderate one. It is the figure most often used by scholars in the field. The ratio of women to men burned is variously estimated at 20 to 1 and 100 to 1.
Witchcraft was a woman’s crime, and much of the text of
the Malleus explains why. First, Jesus Christ was bom, suffered, and died to save men, not women; therefore, women were more vulnerable to Satan’s enticements. Second, a woman
is “more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal
abominations. ”1 This excess of carnality originated in Eve’s
very creation: she was formed from a bent rib. Because of this
defect, women always deceive. Third, women are, by definition, wicked, malicious, vain, stupid, and irredeemably evil: “I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon than to keep house
with a wicked woman.. . . All wickedness is but little to the
wickedness of a woman. . . When a woman thinks alone, she
thinks evil. ”2 Fourth, women are weaker than men in both
mind and body and are intellectually like children. Fifth,
women are “more bitter than death” because all sin originates
in and on account of women, and because women are “wheedling and secret” enemies. 3 Finally, witchcraft was a woman’s crime because “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is
in women insatiable. ”4
I want you to remember that these are not the polemics of
aberrants; these are the convictions of scholars, lawmakers,
judges. I want you to remember that nine million women were
burned alive.
Witches were accused of flying, having carnal relations with
Satan, injuring cattle, causing hailstorms and tempests, causing illnesses and epidemics, bewitching men, changing men and themselves into animals, changing animals into people,
committing acts of cannibalism and murder, stealing male
genitals, causing male genitals to disappear. In fact, this last—
causing male genitals to disappear—was grounds under Catholic law for divorce. If a man’s genitals were invisible for more than three years, his spouse was entitled to a divorce.
It would be hard to locate in Sprenger and Kramer’s gargantuan mass of woman-hating the most odious charge, the most incredible charge, the most ridiculous charge, but I do
think that I have done it. Sprenger and Kramer wrote:
And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who. . . collect
male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat
oats and com, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report? 5
What indeed? What are we to think? What are those of us
who grew up Catholics, for instance, to think? When we see
that priests are performing exorcisms in Amerikan suburbs,
that the belief in witchcraft is still a fundament of Catholic
theology, what are we to think? When we discover that Luther
energized this gynocide through his many confrontations with
Satan, what are we to think? When we discover that Calvin
himself burned witches, and that he personally supervised the
witch hunts in Zurich, what are we to think? When we discover that the fear and loathing of female carnality are codified in Jewish law, what are we to think?
Some of us have a very personal view of the world. We say
that what happens to us in our lives as women happens to us
as individuals. We even say that any violence we have experienced in our lives as women— for instance, rape or assault by a husband, lover, or stranger—happened between two individuals. Some of us even apologize for the aggressor—we feel
sorry for him; we say that he is personally disturbed, or that he
was provoked in a particular way, at a particular time, by a
particular woman.
Men tell us that they too are “oppressed. ” They tell us that
they are often in their individual lives victimized by women—
by mothers, wives, and “girlfrie
nds. ” They tell us that women
provoke acts of violence through our carnality, or malice, or
avarice, or vanity, or stupidity. They tell us that their violence
originates in us and that we are responsible for it. They tell us
that their lives are full of pain, and that we are its source.
They tell us that as mothers we injure them irreparably, as
wives we castrate them, as lovers we steal from them semen,
youth, and manhood— and never, never, as mothers, wives, or
lovers do we ever give them enough.
And what are we to think? Because if we begin to piece
together all of the instances of violence— the rapes, the assaults, the cripplings, the killings, the mass slaughters; if we read their novels, poems, political and philosophical tracts and
see that they think of us today what the Inquisitors thought of
us yesterday; if we realize that historically gynocide is not
some mistake, some accidental excess, some dreadful fluke,
but is instead the logical consequence of what they believe to
be our god-given or biological natures; then we must finally
understand that under patriarchy gynocide is the ongoing
reality of life lived by women. And then we must look to each
other— for the courage to bear it and for the courage to
change it.
The struggle of women, the feminist struggle, is not a struggle for more money per hour, or for equal rights under male law, or for more women legislators who will operate within
the confines of male law. These are all emergency measures,
designed to save women’s lives, as many as possible, now,
today. But these reforms will not stem the tide of gynocide;
these reforms will not end the relentless violence perpetrated
by the gender class men against the gender class women. These
reforms will not stop the increasing rape epidemic in this
country, or the wife-beating epidemic in England. They will
not stop the sterilizations of black and poor white women who
are the victims of male doctors who hate female carnality.
Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics Page 4