Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics Read online

  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, ”