Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics Read online

  silly, almost stupid attitude toward the world. By the time I

  was twelve I knew that I wanted to be a writer or a lawyer. I

  had been raised really without a mother, and so certain ideas

  hadn’t reached me. I didn’t want to be a wife, and I didn’t

  want to be a mother.

  My father had really raised me although I didn’t see a lot of

  him. My father valued books and intellectual dialogue. He was

  the son of Russian immigrants, and they had wanted him to be

  a doctor. That was their dream. He was a devoted son and so,

  even though he wanted to study history, he took a pre-medical

  course in college. He was too squeamish to go through with it

  all. Blood made him ill. So after pre-med, he found himself,

  for almost twenty years, teaching science, which he didn’t like,

  instead of history, which he loved. During the years of doing

  work he disliked, he made a vow that his children would be

  educated as fully as possible and, no matter what it took from

  him, no matter what kind of commitment or work or money,

  his children would become whatever they wanted. My father

  made his children his art, and he devoted himself to nurturing

  those children so that they would become whatever they could

  become. I don’t know why he didn’t make a distinction between his girl child and his boy child, but he didn’t. I don’t know why, from the beginning, he gave me books to read, and

  talked about all of his ideas with me, and watered every ambi­

  tion that I had so that those ambitions would live and be

  nourished and grow—but he did. *

  So in our household, my mother was out of the running as

  an influence. My father, whose great love was history, whose

  commitment was to education and intellectual dialogue, set

  the tone and taught both my brother and me that our proper

  engagement was with the world. He had a whole set of ideas

  and principles that he taught us, in words, by example. He

  believed, for instance, in racial equality and integration when

  those beliefs were seen as absolutely aberrational by all of his

  neighbors, family, and peers. When I, at the age of fifteen,

  declared to a family gathering that if I wanted to marry I

  would marry whomever I wanted, regardless of color, my

  father’s answer before that enraged assembly was that he expected no less. He was a civil libertarian. He believed in unions, and fought hard to unionize teachers— an unpopular

  notion in those days since teachers wanted to see themselves as

  professionals. He taught us those principles in the Bill of

  Rights which are now not thought of very highly by most

  Amerikans— an absolute commitment to free speech in all its

  forms, equality before just law, and racial equality.

  I adored my father, but I had no sympathy for my mother. I

  knew that she was physically brave— my father told me so

  over and over—but I didn’t see her as any Herculean hero. No

  woman ever had been, as far as I knew. Her mind was uninteresting. She seemed small and provincial. I remember that once, in the middle of a terrible argument, she said to me in a

  stony tone of voice: You think I’m stupid. I denied it then, but

  I know today that she was right. And indeed, what else could

  one think of a person whose only concern was that I clean up

  *

  My mother has reminded me that she introduced me to libraries and that

  she also always encouraged me to read. I had forgotten this early shared experience because, as I grew older, she and I had some conflicts over the particular books which I insisted on reading, though she never stopped me

  from reading them. Sometime during my adolescence, books came to connote

  for me, in part, my intellectual superiority over my mother, who did not

  read, and my peership with my father, who did read.

  my room, or wear certain clothes, or comb my hair another

  way. I had, certainly, great reason to think that she was stupid,

  and horrible, and petty, and contemptible even: Edward

  Albee, Philip Wylie, and that great male artist Sigmund Freud

  told me so. Mothers, it seemed to me, were the most expendable of people— no one had a good opinion of them, certainly not the great writers of the past, certainly not the exciting

  writers of the present. And so, though this woman, my mother,

  whether present or absent, was the center of my life in so

  many inexplicable, powerful, unchartable ways, I experienced

  her only as an ignorant irritant, someone without grace or

  passion or wisdom. When I married in 1969 I felt free— free

  of my mother, her prejudices, her ignorant demands.

  I tell you all of this because this story has, possibly for the

  first time in history, a rather happier resolution than one might

  expect.

  Do you remember that in Hemingway’s For Whom the

  Bell Tolls Maria is asked about her lovemaking with Robert,

  did the earth move? For me, too, in my life, the earth has

  sometimes moved. The first time it moved I was ten. I was

  going to Hebrew school, but it was closed, a day of mourning

  for the six million slaughtered by the Nazis. So I went to see my

  cousin who lived nearby. She was shaking, crying, screaming,

  vomiting. She told me that it was April, and in April her

  youngest sister had been killed in front of her, another sister’s

  infant had died a terrible death, their heads had been shaved

  — let me just say that she told me what had happened to her in

  a Nazi concentration camp. She said that every April she remembered in nightmare and terror what had happened to her that month so many years before, and that every April she

  shook, cried, screamed, and vomited. The earth moved for me

  then.

  The second time the earth moved for me was when I was

  eighteen and spent four days in the Women’s House of Detention in New York City. I had been arrested in a demonstration

  against the Indochina genocide. I spent four days and four

  nights in the filth and terror of that jail. While there two doctors gave me a brutal internal examination. I hemorrhaged for fifteen days after that. The earth moved for me then.

  The third time the earth moved for me was when I became

  a feminist. It wasn’t on a particular day, or through one experience. It had to do with that afternoon when I was ten and my cousin put the grief of her life into my hands; it had to do

  with that women’s jail, and three years of marriage that began

  in friendship and ended in despair. It happened sometime after

  I left my husband, when I was living in poverty and great

  emotional distress. It happened slowly, little by little. A week

  after I left my ex-husband I started my book, the book which is

  now called Woman Hating. I wanted to find out what had

  happened to me in my marriage and in the thousand and one

  instances of daily life where it seemed I was being treated like

  a subhuman. I felt that I was deeply masochistic, but that my

  masochism was not personal— each woman I knew lived out

  deep masochism. I wanted to find out why. I knew that I

  hadn’t been taught that masochism by my father, and that my

  mother had not been my immediate teacher. So I began in

  what seemed the only apparent place—with Story of O, a


  book that had moved me profoundly. From that beginning I

  looked at other pornography, fairy tales, one thousand years

  of Chinese footbinding, and the slaughter of nine million

  witches. I learned something about the nature of the world

  which had been hidden from me before— I saw a systematic

  despisal of women that permeated every institution of society,

  every cultural organ, every expression of human being. And I

  saw that I was a woman, a person who met that systematic

  despisal on every street comer, in every living room, in every

  human interchange. Because I became a woman who knew

  that she was a woman, that is, because I became a feminist, I

  began to speak with women for the first time in my life, and

  one of the women I began to speak with was my mother. I

  came to her life through the long dark tunnel of my own. I

  began to see who she was as I began to see the world that had

  formed her. I came to her no longer pitying the poverty of her

  intellect, but astounded by the quality of her intelligence. I

  came to her no longer convinced of her stupidity and triviality, but astonished by the quality of her strength. I came to her, no longer self-righteous and superior, but as a sister, another woman whose life, but for the grace of a feminist father and the new common struggle of my feminist sisters, would

  have repeated hers— and when I say “repeated hers” I mean,

  been predetermined as hers was predetermined. I came to her,

  no longer ashamed of what she lacked, but deeply proud of

  what she had achieved— indeed, I came to recognize that my

  mother was proud, strong, and honest. By the time I was

  twenty-six I had seen enough of the world and its troubles to

  know that pride, strength, and integrity were virtues to honor.

  And because I addressed her in a new way she came to meet

  me, and now, whatever our difficulties, and they are not so

  many, she is my mother, and I am her daughter, and we are

  sisters.

  You asked me to talk about feminism and art, is there a

  feminist art, and if so, what is it. For however long writers

  have written, until today, there has been masculinist art— art

  that serves men in a world made by men. That art has degraded women. It has, almost without exception, characterized us as maimed beings, impoverished sensibilities, trivial people with trivial concerns. It has, almost without exception,

  been saturated with a misogyny so profound, a misogyny that

  was in fact its world view, that almost all of us, until today,

  have thought, that is what the world is, that is how women

  are.

  I ask myself, what did I learn from all those books I read as

  I was growing up? Did I learn anything real or true about

  women? Did I learn anything real or true about centuries of

  women and what they lived? Did those books illuminate my

  life, or life itself, in any useful, or profound, or generous, or

  rich, or textured, or real way? I do not think so. I think that

  that art, those books, would have robbed me of my life as the

  world they served robbed my mother of hers.

  Theodore Roethke, a great poet we are told, a poet of the

  male condition I would insist, wrote:

  Two of the charges most frequently levelled against poetry by

  women are lack of range—in subject matter, in emotional tone—

  and lack of a sense of humor. And one could, in individual instances among writers of real talent, add other aesthetic and moral shortcomings: the spinning-out; the embroidering of trivial themes; a concern with the mere surfaces of life—that special province of the feminine talent in prose—hiding from the real agonies of the spirit; refusing to face up to what existence is;

  lyric or religious posturing; running between the boudoir and the

  altar, stamping a tiny foot against God; or lapsing into a sententiousness that implies the author has re-invented integrity; carrying on excessively about Fate, about time; lamenting the lot of woman. . . and so on. 2

  What characterizes masculinist art, and the men who make it,

  is misogyny— and in the face of that misogyny, someone had

  better reinvent integrity.

  They, the masculinists, have told us that they write about

  the human condition, that their themes are the great themes—

  love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself. They have told

  us that our themes—love, death, heroism, suffering, history

  itself— are trivial because we are, by our very nature, trivial.

  I renounce masculinist art. It is not art which illuminates

  the human condition— it illuminates only, and to men’s final

  and everlasting shame, the masculinist world— and as we look

  around us, that world is not one to be proud of. Masculinist

  art, the art of centuries of men, is not universal, or the final

  explication of what being in the world is. It is, in the end,

  descriptive only of a world in which women are subjugated,

  submissive, enslaved, robbed of full becoming, distinguished

  only by carnality, demeaned. I say, my life is not trivial; my

  sensibility is not trivial; my struggle is not trivial. Nor was my

  mother’s, or her mother’s before her. I renounce those who

  hate women, who have contempt for women, who ridicule and

  demean women, and when I do, I renounce most of the art,

  masculinist art, ever made.

  As feminists, we inhabit the world in a new way. We see the

  world in a new way. We threaten to turn it upside down and

  inside out. We intend to change it so totally that someday the

  texts of masculinist writers will be anthropological curiosities.

  What was that Mailer talking about, our descendants will ask,

  should they come upon his work in some obscure archive.

  And they will wonder—bewildered, sad— at the masculinist

  glorification of war; the masculinist mystifications around killing, maiming, violence, and pain; the tortured masks of phallic heroism; the vain arrogance of phallic supremacy; the

  impoverished renderings of mothers and daughters, and so of

  life itself. They will ask, did those people really believe in

  those gods?

  Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great

  river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless

  stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based

  on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which

  will take the great human themes— love, death, heroism,

  suffering, history itself— and render them fully human. It may

  also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now

  that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new

  theme, one as great and as rich as those others— should we

  call it “joy”?

  We cannot imagine a world in which women are not experienced as trivial and contemptible, in which women are not demeaned, abused, exploited, raped, diminished before we are

  even bom— and so we cannot know what kind of art will be

  made in that new world. Our work, which does full honor to

  those centuries of sisters who went before us, is to midwife

  that new world into being. It will be left to our children and

  their children to live in it.

  2

  Renouncing Sexual “E q u a lity ”

  Equality: 1. the state of b
eing equal; correspondence in

  quantity, degree, value, rank, ability, etc. 2. uniform character, as of motion or surface.

  Freedom: 1. state of being at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint. . . 2. exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc. 3.

  power of determining one’s or its own action. . . 4.

  Philos, the power to make one’s own choices or decisions

  without constraint from within or without; autonomy,

  self-determination. . . 5. civil liberty, as opposed to subjection to an arbitrary or despotic government. 6. political or national independence. . . 8. personal liberty, as opposed to bondage or slavery. . .

  — Syn. f r e e d o m , i n d e p e n d e n c e , l i b e r t y refer to an absence of undue restrictions and an opportunity to exercise one’s rights and powers, f r e e d o m emphasizes the opportunity given for the exercise of one’s rights, powers,

  desires, or the like. . . i n d e p e n d e n c e implies not only

  lack of restrictions but also the ability to stand alone, unsustained by anything else. . .

  — Ant. 1-3. restraint. 5, 6, 8. oppression.

  Justice: 1. the quality of being just; righteousness, equitableness, or moral rightness . . . 2. rightfulness or lawfulness. . . 3. the moral principle determining just conduct.

  4. conformity to this principle, as manifested in conduct;

  just conduct, dealing, or treatment. . .

  from The Random House Dictionary

  of the English Language

  In 1970 Kate Millett published Sexual Politics. In that book

  she proved to many of us— who would have staked our lives

  Delivered at the National Organization for Women Conference on Sexuality,

  New York City, October 12, 1974.

  on denying it— that sexual relations, the literature depicting

  those relations, the psychology posturing to explain those relations, the economic systems that fix the necessities of those relations, the religious systems that seek to control those relations, are political. She showed us that everything that happens to a woman in her life, everything that touches or molds her, is political. 1

  Women who are feminists, that is, women who grasped her

  analysis and saw that it explained much of their real existence