Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics Read online

  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.