love it; who consume or endorse pornography; who insult
specific women or women as a group; who impede or ridicule
women in our struggle for dignity. Men who do or who endorse these behaviors are the enemies of women and are implicated in the crime of rape. Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence
against us.
I have been describing, of course, emergency measures, designed to help women survive as atrocity is being waged against us. How can we end the atrocity itself? Clearly, we
must determine the root causes of rape and we must work to
excise from our social fabric all definitions, values, and behaviors which energize and sanction rape.
What, then, are the root causes of rape?
Rape is the direct consequence of our polar definitions of
men and women. Rape is congruent with these definitions;
rape inheres in these definitions. Remember, rape is not committed by psychopaths or deviants from our social norms—
rape is committed by exemplars of our social norms. In this
male-supremacist society, men are defined as one order of
being over and against women who are defined as another,
opposite, entirely different order of being. Men are defined as
aggressive, dominant, powerful. Women are defined as passive, submissive, powerless. Given these polar gender defini
tions, it is the very nature of men to aggress sexually against
women. Rape occurs when a man, who is dominant by definition, takes a woman who, according to men and all the organs of their culture, was put on this earth for his use and gratification. Rape, then, is the logical consequence of a system of definitions of what is normative. Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake—it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it. As long as these definitions remain intact—
that is, as long as men are defined as sexual aggressors and
women are defined as passive receptors lacking integrity—
men who are exemplars of the norm will rape women.
In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is, by definition, intensely and rigidly phallic. A man’s identity is located in his conception of himself
as the possessor of a phallus; a man’s worth is located in his
pride in phallic identity. The main characteristic of phallic
identity is that worth is entirely contingent on the possession
of a phallus. Since men have no other criteria for worth, no
other notion of identity, those who do not have phalluses are
not recognized as fully human.
In thinking about this, you must realize that this is not a
question of heterosexual or homosexual. Male homosexuality
is not a renunciation of phallic identity. Heterosexual and
homosexual men are equally invested in phallic identity. They
manifest this investment differently in one area—the choice of
what men call a “sexual object”—but their common valuation
of women consistently reinforces their own sense of phallic
worth.
It is this phallocentric identity of men that makes it possible
— indeed, necessary—for men to view women as a lower
order of creation. Men genuinely do not know that women are
individual persons of worth, volition, and sensibility because
masculinity is the signet of all worth, and masculinity is a
function of phallic identity. Women, then, by definition, have
no claim to the rights and responsibilities of personhood.
Wonderful George Gilder, who can always be counted on to
tell us the dismal truth about masculinity, has put it this way:
. . unlike femininity, relaxed masculinity is at bottom
empty, a limp nullity.. . . Manhood at the most basic level can
be validated and expressed only in action. ”40 And so, what
are the actions that validate and express this masculinity:
rape, first and foremost rape; murder, war, plunder, fighting,
imperializing and colonializing — aggression in any and every
form, and to any and every degree. All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.
As women, of course, we do not have phallic identities, and
so we are defined as opposite from and inferior to men. Men
consider physical strength, for instance, to be implicit in and
derived from phallic identity, and so for thousands of years we
have been systematically robbed of our physical strength. Men
consider intellectual accomplishment to be a function of phallic identity, and so we are intellectually incompetent by their definition. Men consider moral acuity to be a function of phallic identity, and so we are consistently characterized as vain, malicious, and immoral creatures. Even the notion that
women need to be fucked— which is the a priori assumption of
the rapist— is directly derived from the specious conviction
that the only worth is phallic worth: men are willing, or able,
to recognize us only when we have attached to us a cock in the
course of sexual intercourse. Then, and only then, we are for
them real women.
As nonphallic beings, women are defined as submissive,
passive, virtually inert. For all of patriarchal history, we have
been defined by law, custom, and habit as inferior because of
our nonphallic bodies. Our sexual definition is one of “masochistic passivity” : “masochistic” because even men recognize their systematic sadism against us; “passivity” not because we
are naturally passive, but because our chains are very heavy
and as a result, we cannot move.
The fact is that in order to stop rape, and all of the other
systematic abuses against us, we must destroy these very defi
nitions of masculinity and femininity, of men and women. We
must destroy completely and for all time the personality structures “dominant-active, or male” and “submissive-passive, or female. ” We must excise them from our social fabric, destroy
any and all institutions based on them, render them vestigial,
useless. We must destroy the very structure of culture as we
know it, its art, its churches, its laws; we must eradicate from
consciousness and memory all of the images, institutions, and
structural mental sets that turn men into rapists by definition
and women into victims by definition. Until we do, rape will
remain our primary sexual model and women will be raped by
men.
As women, we must begin this revolutionary work. When
we change, those who define themselves over and against us
will have to kill us all, change, or die. In order to change, we
must renounce every male definition we have ever learned; we
must renounce male definitions and descriptions of our lives,
our bodies, our needs, our wants, our worth—we must take
for ourselves the power of naming. We must refuse to be com-
plicit in a sexual-social system that is built on our labor as an
inferior slave class. We must unlearn the passivity we have
been trained to over thousands of years. We must unlearn the
masochism we have been trained to over thousands of years.
And, most importantly, in freeing ourselves, we must refuse to
imitate the phallic identitie
s of men. We must not internalize
their values and we must not replicate their crimes.
In 1870, Susan B. Anthony wrote to a friend:
So while I do not pray for anybody or any party to commit outrages, still I do pray, and that earnestly and constantly, for some terrific shock to startle the women of this nation into a self-respect which will compel them to see the abject degradation of
their present position; which will force them to break their yoke
of bondage, and give them faith in themselves; which will make
them proclaim their allegiance to woman first; which will enable
them to see that man can no more feel, speak, or act for woman
than could the old slaveholder for his slave. The fact is, women
are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it. 0, to compel them to see and feel, and to give them the courage and conscience to speak and act for
their own freedom, though they face the scorn and contempt of
all the world for doing it. 41
Isn’t rape the outrage that will do this, sisters, and isn’t it
time?
5
The Sexual P o litics of Fear and Courage
(For my mother)
( i )
I want to talk to you about fear and courage—what each is,
how they are related to each other, and what place each has in
a woman’s life.
When I was trying to think through what to say here today,
I thought that I might just tell stories—stories of the lives of
very brave women. There are many such stories to tell, and I
am always inspired by these stories, and I thought that you
might be too. But, while these stories always enable us to feel
a kind of collective pride, they also allow us to mystify particular acts of courage and to deify those who have committed them— we say, oh, yes, she was like that, but I am not; we say,
she was such an extraordinary woman, but I am not. So I
Delivered at Queens College, City University of New York, March 12, 1975;
Fordham University, New York City, December 16, 1975.
decided to try to think through fear and courage in another
way— in a more analytical, political way.
I am going to try to delineate for you the sexual politics of
fear and courage— that is, how fear is learned as a function of
femininity; and how courage is the red badge of masculinity.
I believe that we are all products of the culture in which we
live; and that in order to understand what we think of as our
personal experiences, we must understand first how the culture informs what we see and how we understand. In other words, the culture in which we live determines for us to an
astonishing degree how we perceive, what we perceive, how
we name and value our experiences, how and why we act at
all.
The first fact of this culture is that it is male supremacist:
that is, men are, by birthright, law, custom, and habit, systematically and consistently defined as superior to women.
This definition, which postulates that men are a gender class
over and against women, inheres in every organ and institution of this culture. There are no exceptions to this particular rule.
In a male supremacist culture, the male condition is taken
to be the human condition, so that, when any man speaks—
for instance, as an artist, historian, or philosopher— he speaks
objectively— that is, as someone who has, by definition, no
special bone to pick, no special investment which would slant
his view; he is somehow an embodiment of the norm. Women,
on the other hand, are not men. Therefore women are, by
virtue of male logic, not the norm, a different, lower order of
being, subjective rather than objective, a confused amalgam of
special bones to pick which make our perceptions, judgments,
and decisions untrustworthy, not credible, whimsical. Simone
de Beauvoir in the preface to The Second Sex described it this
way:
In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not. . . like that of
two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the
neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate
human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the
negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.. . .
“The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities, ”
said Aristotle; “we should regard the female nature as afflicted
with a natural defectiveness. ” And St. Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an “imperfect man, ” an “incidental”
being. . .
Thus, humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself
but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous
being. 1
We can locate easily the precise way in which we are
“afflicted with a natural defectiveness. ” As Freud so eloquently put it two millennia after Aristotle:
[Women] notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly
visible and of large proportions, [and] at once recognize it as the
superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ-----
. . . After a woman has become aware of the wound to her
narcissism, she develops, like a scar, a sense of inferiority. When
she has passed beyond her first attempt at explaining her lack of
a penis as being a punishment personal to herself and has realized that that sexual character is a universal one, she begins to share the contempt felt by men for a sex which is the lesser in so
important a respect. . . 2
Now, the terrible truth is that in a patriarchy, possession of
a phallus is the sole signet of worth, the touchstone of human
identity. All positive human attributes are seen as inherent in
and consequences of that single biological accident. Intellect,
moral discernment, creativity, imagination— all are male, or
phallic, faculties. When any woman develops any one of these
faculties, we are told either that she is striving to behave “like
a man” or that she is “masculine. ”
One particularly important attribute of phallic identity is
courage. Manhood can be functionally described as the capacity for courageous action. A man is born with that capacity—
that is, with a phallus. Each tiny male infant is a potential
hero. His mother is supposed to raise and nurture him so that
he can develop that inherent capacity. His father is supposed
to embody in the world that capacity fully realized.
Any work or activity that a male does, or any nascent talent
that a male might have, has a mythic dimension: it can be
recognized by male culture as heroic and the manhood of any
male who embodies it is thereby affirmed.
The kinds and categories of mythic male heroes are numerous. A man can be a hero if he climbs a mountain, or plays football, or pilots an airplane. A man can be a hero if he
writes a book, or composes a piece of music, or directs a play.
A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug
addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A
man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because
he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is “sensitive”; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a
has a mythic rendering in the culture— in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.
It is precisely this mythic dimension of all male activity
which reifies the gender class system so that male supremacy is
unchallengeable and unchangeable. Women are never confirmed as heroic or courageous agents because the capacity for courageous action inheres in maleness itself—it is identifiable
and affirmable only as a male capacity. Women, remember,
are “female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities. ” One of the
qualities we must lack in order to pass as female is the capacity for courageous action.
This goes right to the core of female invisibility in this culture. No matter what we do, we are not seen. Our acts are not witnessed, not observed, not experienced, not recorded, not
affirmed. Our acts have no mythic dimension in male terms
simply because we are not men, we do not have phalluses.
When men do not see a cock, they do not in fact see anything;
they perceive a lack of qualities, an absence. They see nothing
of value since they only recognize phallic value; and they cannot value what they do not see. They may fill in the empty spaces, the absence, with all sorts of monstrous imaginings—
for instance, they may imagine that the vagina is a hole filled
with teeth— but they cannot recognize a woman for who she is
as a discrete, actual being; nor can they grasp what a woman’s
body is to her, that is, that she experiences herself as actual,
and not as the negative of a man; nor can they understand that
women are not “empty” inside. This last male illusion, or hallucination, is as interesting as it is shocking. I have often heard men describe the vagina as “empty space”—the notion being
that the defining characteristic of women from the top of the
legs to the waist is internal emptiness. Somehow, the illusion is
that women contain an internal space which is an absence and
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