willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his
sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice
of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and
redeem the masculinity of her lover.
In pornography, we see female love raw, its naked erotic
skeleton; we can almost touch the bones of our dead. Love is
the erotic masochistic drive; love is the frenzied passion
which compels a woman to submit to a diminishing life in
chains; love is the consuming sexual impulse toward degradation and abuse. The woman does literally give herself to the man; he does literally take and possess her.
The primary transaction which expresses this female submission and this male possession, in pornography as in life, is the act of fucking. Fucking is the basic physical expression of
male positivity and female negativity. The relationship of sadist to masochist does not originate in the act of fucking; rather, it is expressed and renewed there.
For the male, fucking is a compulsive act, in pornography
and in real life. But in real life, and not in pornography, it is
an act fraught with danger, filled with dread. That sanctified
organ of male positivity, the phallus, penetrates into the female void. During penetration, the male’s whole being is his penis— it and his will to domination are entirely one; the erect
penis is his identity; all sensation is localized in the penis and
in effect the rest of his body is insensate, dead. During penetration, a male’s very being is at once both risked and affirmed.
Will the female void swallow him up, consume him, engulf
and destroy his penis, his whole self? Will the female void
pollute his virile positivity with its noxious negativity? Will the
female void contaminate his tenuous maleness with the overwhelming toxicity of its femaleness? Or will he emerge from the terrifying emptiness of the female’s anatomical gaping hole
intact—his positivity reified because, even when inside her, he
managed to maintain the polarity of male and female by maintaining the discreteness and integrity of his steel-like rod; his masculinity affirmed because he did not in fact merge with her
and in so doing lose himself, he did not dissolve into her, he
did not become her nor did he become like her, he was not
subsumed by her.
This dangerous journey into the female void must be undertaken again and again, compulsively, because masculinity is nothing in and of itself; in and of itself it does not exist; it has
reality only over and against, or in contrast to, female negativity. Masculinity can only be experienced, achieved, recognized, and embodied in opposition to femininity. When men posit sex, violence, and death as elemental erotic truths, they
mean this—that sex, or fucking, is the act which enables them
to experience their own reality, or identity, or masculinity
most concretely; that violence, or sadism, is the means by
which they actualize that reality, or identity, or masculinity;
and that death, or negation, or nothingness, or contamination
by the female is what they risk each time they penetrate into
what they imagine to be the emptiness of the female hole.
What then is behind the claim that fucking is pleasurable
for the male? How can an act so saturated with the dread of
loss of self, of loss of penis, be pleasurable? How can an act so
obsessive, so anxiety-ridden, be characterized as pleasurable?
First, it is necessary to understand that this is precisely the
fantasy dimension of pornography. In the rarefied environs of
male pornography, male dread is excised from the act of fucking, censored, edited out. The sexual sadism of males rendered so vividly in pornography is real; women experience it daily.
Male domination over and against female flesh is real; women
experience it daily. The brutal uses to which female bodies are
put in pornography are real; women suffer these abuses on a
global scale, day after day, year after year, generation after
generation. What is not real, what is fantasy, is the male claim
at the heart of pornography that fucking is for them an ecstatic experience, the ultimate pleasure, an unmixed blessing, a natural and easy act in which there is no terror, no dread, no
fear. Nothing in reality documents this claim. Whether we
examine the slaughter of the nine million witches in Europe
which was fueled by the male dread of female carnality, or
examine the phenomenon of rape which exposes fucking as an
act of overt hostility against the female enemy, or investigate
impotence which is the involuntary inability to enter the female void, or trace the myth of the vagina dentata (the vagina full of teeth) which is derived from a paralyzing fear of female
genitalia, or isolate menstrual taboos as an expression of male
terror, we find that in real life the male is obsessed with his
fear of the female, and that this fear is most vivid to him in the
act of fucking.
Second, it is necessary to understand that pornography is a
kind of propaganda designed to convince the male that he
need not be afraid, that he is not afraid; to shore him up so
that he can fuck; to convince him that fucking is an unalloyed
joy; to obscure for him the reality of his own terror by providing a pornographic fantasy of pleasure which he can learn as a creed and from which he can act to dominate women as a real
man must. We might say that in pornography the whips, the
chains, and the other paraphernalia of brutality are security
blankets which give the lie to the pornographic claim that fucking issues from manhood like light from the sun. But in life, even the systematized abuse of women and the global subjugation of women to men is not sufficient to stem the terror inherent for the male in the act of fucking.
Third, it is necessary to understand that what is experienced
by the male as authentic pleasure is the affirmation of his own
identity as a male. Each time he survives the peril of entering
the female void, his masculinity is reified. He has proven both
that he is not her and that he is like other hims. No pleasure
on earth matches the pleasure of having proven himself real,
positive and not negative, a man and not a woman, a bona
fide member of the group which holds dominion over all other
living things.
Fourth, it is necessary to understand that under the sexual
system of male positivity and female negativity, there is literally nothing in the act of fucking, except accidental clitoral friction, which recognizes or actualizes the real eroticism of
the female, even as it has survived under slave conditions.
Within the confines of the male-positive system, this eroticism
does not exist. After all, a negative is a negative is a negative.
Fucking is entirely a male act designed to affirm the reality
and power of the phallus, of masculinity. For women, the
pleasure in being fucked is the masochistic pleasure of experiencing self-negation. Under the male-positive system, the masochistic pleasure of self-negation is both mythicized and
mystified in order to compel women to believe that we experience fulfillment in selflessness, pleasure in pain, validation in self-sacrifice, femininity in submission to masculinity. Trained
from birth to conform to the requirements of this peculiar
world view, punished severely when we do not learn masochistic submission well enough, entirely encapsula
ted inside the boundaries of the male-positive system, few women ever experience themselves as real in and of themselves. Instead, women are real to themselves to the degree that they identify
with and attach themselves to the positivity of males. In being
fucked, a woman attaches herself to one who is real to himself
and vicariously experiences reality, such as it is, through him;
in being fucked, a woman experiences the masochistic pleasure of her own negation which is perversely articulated as the fulfillment of her femininity.
Now, I want to make a crucial distinction— the distinction
between truth and reality. For humans, reality is social', reality
is whatever people at a given time believe it to be. In saying
this, I do not mean to suggest that reality is either whimsical or
accidental. In my view, reality is always a function of politics
in general and sexual politics in particular— that is, it serves
the powerful by fortifying and justifying their right to domination over the powerless. Reality is whatever premises social and cultural institutions are built on. Reality is also the rape,
the whip, the fuck, the hysterectomy, the clitoridectomy, the
mastectomy, the bound foot, the high-heel shoe, the corset, the
make-up, the veil, the assault and battery, the degradation and
mutilation in their concrete manifestations. Reality is enforced
by those whom it serves so that it appears to be self-evident.
Reality is self-perpetuating, in that the cultural and social institutions built on its premises also embody and enforce those premises. Literature, religion, psychology, education, medicine, the science of biology as currently understood, the social sciences, the nuclear family, the nation-state, police, armies,
and civil law— all embody the given reality and enforce it on
us. The given reality is, of course, that there are two sexes,
male and female; that these two sexes are opposite from each
other, polar; that the male is inherently positive and the female inherently negative; and that the positive and negative poles of human existence unite naturally into a harmonious
whole.
Truth, on the other hand, is not nearly so accessible as
reality. In my view, truth is absolute in that it does exist and it
can be found. Radium, for instance, always existed; it was
always true that radium existed; but radium did not figure in
the human notion of reality until Marie and Pierre Curie isolated it. When they did, the human notion of reality had to change in fundamental ways to accommodate the truth of
radium. Similarly, the earth was always a sphere; this was
always true; but until Columbus sailed west to find the East, it
was not real. We might say that truth does exist, and that it is
the human project to find it so that reality can be based on
it.
I have made this distinction between truth and reality in
order to enable me to say something very simple: that while
the system of gender polarity is real, it is not true. It is not true
that there are two sexes which are discrete and opposite, which
are polar, which unite naturally and self-evidently into a harmonious whole. It is not true that the male embodies both positive and neutral human qualities and potentialities in contrast to the female who is female, according to Aristotle and all of male culture, “by virtue of a certain lack of qualities. ”
And once we do not accept the notion that men are positive
and women are negative, we are essentially rejecting the notion that there are men and women at all. In other words, the system based on this polar model of existence is absolutely
real; but the model itself is not true. We are living imprisoned
inside a pernicious delusion, a delusion on which all reality as
we know it is predicated.
In my view, those of us who are women inside this system of
reality will never be free until the delusion of sexual polarity is
destroyed and until the system of reality based on it is eradicated entirely from human society and from human memory.
This is the notion of cultural transformation at the heart of
feminism. This is the revolutionary possibility inherent in the
feminist struggle.
As I see it, our revolutionary task is to destroy phallic identity in men and masochistic nonidentity in women—that is, to destroy the polar realities of men and women as we now know
them so that this division of human flesh into two camps— one
an armed camp and the other a concentration camp— is no
longer possible. Phallic identity is real and it must be destroyed. Female masochism is real and it must be destroyed.
The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations— for instance, law, art, religion, nationstates, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right—
these institutions are real and they must be destroyed. If they
are not, we will be consigned as women to perpetual inferiority and subjugation.
I believe that freedom for women must begin in the repudiation of our own masochism. I believe that we must destroy in ourselves the drive to masochism at its sexual roots. I believe
that we must establish our own authenticity, individually and
among ourselves— to experience it, to create from it, and also
to deprive men of occasions for reifying the lie of manhood
over and against us. I believe that ridding ourselves of our
own deeply entrenched masochism, which takes so many tortured forms, is the first priority; it is the first deadly blow that we can strike against systematized male dominance. In effect,
when we succeed in excising masochism from our own personalities and constitutions, we will be cutting the male life line to power over and against us, to male worth in contradistinction to female degradation, to male identity posited on brutally enforced female negativity— we will be cutting the
male life line to manhood itself. Only when manhood is dead
— and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it— only then will we know what it is to be free.
N otes
1. Feminism, Art, and My Mother Sylvia
1. Joseph Chaikin, The Presence of the Actor (New York: Atheneum,
1972), p. 126.
2. Theodore Roethke, “The Poetry of Louise Bogan/’ On the Poet and
His Craft: Selected Prose o f Theodore Roethke, ed. Ralph J. Mills (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1965), pp. 133-134.
2. Renouncing Sexual “Equality”
1. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970).
2. Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter, eds., Revelations: Diaries of
Women (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 143-144.
3. Remembering the Witches
1. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, trans.
M. Summers (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971), p. 44.
2. Ibid., p. 43.
3. Ibid., p. 47.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 121.
4. The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door
1. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity, ” Women and Analysis, ed. Jean Strouse
(New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974), p. 90.
2. The Jerusalem Bible (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
1966), pp. 243-244.
3. Ibid., p. 245.
4. Cited by Carol V. Horos, Rape (New Canaan, Conn.: Tobey Publishing Co., Inc., 1974), p. 3.
5. Cited by Andra Medea and Kathleen Thompson, Against Rape (New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 19
74), p. 27.
6. Horos, op. cit., p. 6.
7. William Matthews, The Ill-Framed Knight: A Skeptical Inquiry into the
Identity of Sir Thomas Malory (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1966), p. 17.
8. Medea and Thompson, op. cit., p. 13.
9. “Forcible and Statutory Rape: An Exploration of the Operation and
Objectives of the Consent Standard, '* The Yale Law Journal, LXII (December 1952), pp. 52-83.
10. Ibid., pp. 72-73.
11. Medea and Thompson, op. cit., p. 26.
12. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), pp. 8, 9, 33, 37, 47-49, 100, 106, 167.
13. New York Radical Feminists, Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women,
eds. Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson (New York: New American Library, 1974), p. 165.
14. Ibid.
15. Medea and Thompson, op. cit., p. 16.
16. The Institute for Sex Research, Sex Offenders (New York: Harper &
Row, 1965), p. 205.
17. Menachim Amir, Patterns of Forcible Rape (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1971), p. 314.
18. Susan Griffin, “Rape: The All-American Crime, ” Ramparts, X (September 1971), p. 27.
19. Amir, op. cit., p. 52.
20. Amir, op. cit., p. 57.
21. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports, 1974 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1974), p. 22.
22. Horos, op. cit., p. 24.
23. Federal Bureau of Investigation, op. cit., p. 24.
24. Medea and Thompson, op. cit., p. 134.
25. Amir, op. cit., pp. 234-235; Medea and Thompson, op. cit., p. 29.
26. Medea and Thompson, op. cit., p. 135.
27. Amir, op. c/7., p. 142.
28. Horos, loc. cit.
29. Medea and Thompson, op. cit., p. 12.
30. Sgt. Henry T. O’Reilly, New York City Police Department Sex Crimes
Analysis Unit, quoted in Joyce Wadler, “Cop, Students Talk About Rape, ”
Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics Page 15