fe๓iຖist th໐นງht.

♀ women's collective liberation ♀

[femalethink]

Moralism subordinates women by veiling, sequestering, ensuring economic dependency, and enforcing strict codes of modesty and a sexual double standard (making sure there is a steady supply of faithful wives, pure daughters, and prostitutes for men, mostly female but also male). Pornography accomplishes the same end by stripping women, ordaining constant sexual availability, and defining all females as mantraps and inherent "whores," just waiting to be offered the right price. The relationship between moralism and pornography works like the "good cop/bad cop" trick. When women rebel against the moralist code, the system responds by offering pseudo-liberation: fashions marking girls and women as sexual prey, the opportunity to work, mostly for less pay (on top of totally unpaid housework and child-rearing), smoke, drink, have "boob" and face jobs, have pornography introduced into relationships, and be a sex object and spectacle for as many men as possible. All this takes place alongside a backlash of sensational and public sexual violence. When women seek relief from this set of conditions, the system promises order and protection for "good" women via the imposition of patriarchal family values (male dominance and female servitude, sexual and otherwise, in the home), "modest" dress, sexual ignorance; punitive scrutiny of women's sexual behavior, restricted entry to public and occupational space, censorship, covenant marriage, and officially sanctioned homophobia. Some women (e.g., Shalit, 1999), even some feminists (Wolf, 2003), have suggested a return to practices of religious "modesty" as workable resistance to the mainstreaming of pornography and disrespect for women. But this would be utter folly. The feminist challenge is to recognize the fundamental identity of the two systems and to make a different world altogether.

—Jane Caputi, "Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture."

[femalethink]

To be a woman is to be an actress. Being feminine is a kind of theater, with its appropriate costumes, décor, lighting, and stylized gestures. From early childhood on, girls are trained to care in a pathologically exaggerated way about their appearance and are profoundly mutilated (to the extent of being unfitted for first-class adulthood) by the extent of the stress put on presenting themselves as physically attractive objects. Women look in the mirror more frequently than men do. It is, virtually, their duty to look at themselves—to look often. Indeed, a woman who is not narcissistic is considered unfeminine. And a woman who spends literally most of her time caring for, and making purchases to flatter, her physical appearance is not regarded in this society as what she is: a kind of moral idiot. She is thought to be quite normal and is envied by other women whose time is mostly used up at jobs or caring for large families. The display of narcissism goes on all the time. It is expected that women will disappear several times in an evening—at a restaurant, at a party, during a theater intermission, in the course of a social visit—simply to check their appearance, to see that nothing has gone wrong with their makeup and hairstyling, to make sure that their clothes are not spotted or too wrinkled or not hanging properly. It is even acceptable to perform this activity in public. At the table in a restaurant, over coffee, a woman opens a compact mirror and touches up her makeup and hair without embarrassment in front of her husband or her friends.

All this behavior, which is written off as normal "vanity" in women, would seem ludicrous in a man.

—Susan Sontag, “On Women.”

[femalethink]

In a male-run society that defines women as an inferior and parasitical class, a woman who does not achieve male approval in some form is doomed. To legitimate her existence, a woman must be more than woman, she must continually search for an out from her inferior definition; and men are the only ones in a position to bestow on her this state of grace. But because the woman is rarely allowed to realize herself through activity in the larger (male) society—and when she is, she is seldom granted the recognition she deserves—it becomes easier to try for the recognition of one man than of many; and in fact this is exactly the choice most women make. Thus once more the phenomenon of love, good in itself, is corrupted by its class context: women must have love not only for healthy reasons but actually to validate their existence.

In addition, the continued economic dependence of women makes a situation of healthy love between equals impossible. Women today still live under a system of patronage: with few exceptions, they have the choice, not between either freedom or marriage, but between being either public or private property. Women who merge with a member of the ruling class can at least hope that some of his privilege will, so to speak, rub off. But women without men are in the same situation as orphans: they are a helpless sub-class lacking the protection of the powerful. This is the antithesis of freedom when they are still (negatively) defined by a class situation: for now they are in a situation of magnified vulnerability.

To participate in one's subjection by choosing one's master often gives the illusion of free choice; but in reality a woman is never free to choose love without ulterior motives. For her at the present time, the two things, love and status, must remain inextricably intertwined.

—Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.”

[femalethink]

A book on radical feminism that did not deal with love would be a political failure. For love, perhaps even more than child-bearing, is the pivot of women's oppression today. I realize this has frightening implications: do we want to get rid of love?

The panic felt at any threat to love is a good clue to its political significance. Another sign that love is central to any analysis of women or sex psychology is its omission from culture itself, its relegation to 'personal life'. (And whoever heard of logic in the bedroom?) Yes, it is portrayed in novels, even metaphysics, but in them it is described, or better, re-created, not analysed. Love has never been understood, though it may have been fully experienced, and that experience communicated.

There is reason for this absence of analysis: women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture.

The tired question 'What were women doing while men created masterpieces?' deserves more than the obvious reply: women were barred from culture, exploited in their role of mother. Or its reverse: women had no need for paintings since they created children. Love is tied to culture in much deeper ways than that. Men were thinking, writing, and creating, because women were pouring their energy into those men; women are not creating culture because they are preoccupied with love.

—Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.”

[femalethink]

Male desire is presented as a response to female beauty. It is dogmatically maintained, in the ideology, that men fuck women because the women attract, are sensual, are pretty, have some dimension of beauty or grace, however lowdown or elegant, that brings on desire. The ravaged junkie-prostitutes on our contemporary streets who quantitatively do the elephant’s share of the fucking in this society or the toothless bawds of history who got fucked more than the elegant ladies by all accounts are happily invisible in the ideological representations of how, why, when, and under what circumstances men fuck. The ideology allows for the fanciful development of a psychology of personal desire: the man is complex and interesting, lured as a unique individual by various manifestations of beauty in women. But as Lenny Bruce noted: “You put guys on a desert island and they’ll do it to mud.” Men dignify themselves by insisting on a correspondence between fucking and beauty, but there is none (see Baudelaire); men fuck female in the metaphysical sense. Because male ideology has the authority of truth, male desire is taken as a real recognition of or measure of female beauty, even though male desire in reality is a sexual recognition of female as female, fucking the empirical proof that she is, therefore he can use her.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[femalethink]

In the fuck, the man expresses the geography of his dominance: her sex, her insides are part of his domain as a male. He can possess her as an individual—be her lord and master—and thus be expressing a private right of ownership (the private right issuing from his gender); or he can possess her by fucking her impersonally and thus be expressing a collective right of ownership without masquerade or manners. Most women are not distinct, private individuals to most men; and so the fuck tends toward the class assertion of dominance. Women live inside this reality of being owned and being fucked: are sensate inside it; the body learning to respond to what male dominance offers as touch, as sex, as love. For women, being possessed is the sex that has to meet the need for love or tenderness or physical affection; therefore, it comes to mean, to show, the intensity of desire; and being erotically owned by a man who takes you and fucks you is a physically charged and meaningful affirmation of womanhood or femininity or being desired.

This reality of being owned and being fucked—as experience, a social, political, economic, and psychological unity— frames, limits, sets parameters for, what women feel and experience in sex. Being that person who is owned and fucked means becoming someone who experiences sensuality in being possessed: in the touch of the possessor, in his fuck, however callous it is to the complexity or the subtlety of one’s own humanity. Because a woman’s capacity to feel sexual pleasure is developed within the narrow confines of male sexual dominance, internally there is no separate being—conceived, nurtured somewhere else, under different material circumstances— screaming to get out. There is only the flesh-and-blood reality of being a sensate being whose body experiences sexual intensity, sexual pleasure, and sexual identity in being possessed: in being owned and fucked. It is what one knows; and one’s capacities to feel and to be are narrowed, sliced down, to fit the demands and dimensions of this sentient reality.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[femalethink]

The old virginity—with its real potential for freedom and self-determination—is transformed into the new virginity—listless, dissatisfied ennui until awakened by the adventure of male sexual domination: combat on the world’s tiniest battlefield. It took Freud to call the refusal to fight on that little battlefield “repression” and to name the ambition to fight on the large one “penis envy.” The cell door closed behind us, and the key turned in the lock.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[femalethink]

Sophie Tolstoy, having been “transformed into a person” already, discovered another meaning in the word:

Today I woke up for the first time with a sudden awareness of the beauty of nature; and my feeling was virginal—I mean, without associations, without the recollection of anyone through whom I might have loved the beautiful nature of this countryside in the past. Some time ago I worked out a whole theory of the virginal attitude to religion, art, and nature. Religion is pure and virginal when it is not connected with all those Fathers... but connects my heart with God alone.

Significantly, she found art virginal “when you love it for its own sake and without reference to the artist...” Experience unmediated by male ego or interpretation is her idea of virginity. In the male frame, virginity is a state of passive waiting or vulnerability; it precedes and is antithetical to wholeness, to a woman existing in a way that counts; she counts when the man, through sex, brings her to life. In the woman’s frame, virginity is a fuller experience of selfhood and identity. In the male frame, virginity is virtually synonymous with ignorance; in the woman’s frame, it is recovery of the capacity to know by direct experience of the world.

... We live in the male frame; pinned there. Virginity is ignorance; and knowledge is being transformed by knowledge of a man, not just penetrated, the literal event. Virginity is in not yet having been subsumed: one's being is still intact, penetrated or not.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[femalethink]

Joan did not die because men desired her; but because she refused the status, including the outward trappings (female clothing), of one who could be so desired at all. Virginity was one dimension of her overall strategy, one aspect of her rebellion; and, interestingly, her refusal to have sex with a man was not a dogmatic or ideological one.

… Instead for Joan—and Catherine and Margaret—virginity was an active element of a self-determined integrity, an existential independence, affirmed in choice and faith from minute to minute; not a retreat from life but an active engagement with it; dangerous and confrontational because it repudiated rather than endorsed male power over women. For all three women, virginity was “a passage, not a permanent condition,” the precondition for a precocious, tragic passage to death. As rebellion, virginity amounted to a capital crime.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[femalethink]

St. Catherine was pictured with the wheel named after her, St. Margaret with a dragon, both with swords. They were shown with swords because they had been decapitated, but the abridgement of the narrative into a martial image conveyed militance, not just martyrdom. Each faced what amounted to a state-waged war against her person: the whole power of the state—military, physical, sadistic—arrayed against her will and her resistance and the limits of a body fragile because human. This goes beyond the timorous ambition of today: a woman fights off a rapist. Each of these women fought off a rapist who used the apparatus of the state—prison and torture—to destroy her as if she were an enemy nation. Each refused the male appropriation of her body for sex, the right to which is a basic premise of male domination; each refused a man in whom male power and state power were united, a prototype for male power over women; and each viewed the integrity of her physical body as synonymous with the purity of her faith, her purpose, her self-determination, her honor. This was not a puerile virginity defined by fear or effeminacy. This was a rebel virginity harmonious with the deepest values of resistance to any political despotism.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[femalethink]

Living among men, sleeping “all in the straw together,” seen bare-breasted, Joan accomplished an escape from the female condition more miraculous than any military victory: she had complete physical freedom, especially freedom of movement—on the earth, outside a domicile, among men. She had that freedom because men felt no desire for her or believed that “it was not possible to try it.” She made an empirically successful escape from a metaphysical definition of female that is socially real, socially absolute, and intrinsically coercive. She did not have to run the gauntlet of male desire; and so she was free, a rare and remarkable quality and kind of freedom— commonplace for men, virtually unattainable for women.

... Her intractable male identification, expressed not in the usual female submission to the male but in an attempted coequal bonding with him, was central to her quest for freedom. Under patriarchy, men have freedom because they are men. To want freedom is to want not only what men have but also what men are. This is male identification as militance, not feminine submission; it is deviant, complex. One wants what men have—especially physical freedom (freedom of movement, freedom from physical domination); and to have what men have one must be what men are. Joan’s unselfconscious and unrepentant assumption of a male role (both martial and heroic) was the crime against male supremacy that cost her her life. She was killed for the freedom she took, the status she usurped, her defiance of the determinism of gender. By repudiating her female status, she repudiated a life of being held hostage by male sexual desire. She became an exile from gender with a male vocation and male clothes, the clothing especially an outrage and eventually a capital crime.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[femalethink]

Joan’s story is not female until the end, when she died, like nine million other women, in flames, condemned by the Inquisition for witchcraft, heresy, and sorcery. Precisely because she was a hero whose biography brazenly and without precedent violates the constraints of being female until the terrible suffering of her death, her story, valorous and tragic, is political, not magical; mythic because she existed, was real, not because her persona has been enlarged over the centuries. Her virginity was not an expression of some aspect of her femininity or her preciousness as a woman, despite the existence of a cultish worship of virginity as a feminine ideal. She was known as Joan the Maid or, simply, The Maid (“La Pucelle”). Her reputation, her declaration, preceded her, established her intention and her terms; not in the context of being a holy or ideal female but in the context of waging war. Her virginity was a self-conscious and militant repudiation of the common lot of the female with its intrinsic low status, which, then as now, appeared to have something to do with being fucked. Joan wanted to be virtuous in the old sense, before the Christians got hold of it: virtuous meant brave, valiant. She incarnated virtue in its original meaning: strength or manliness. Her virginity was an essential element of her virility, her autonomy, her rebellious and intransigent self-definition. Virginity was freedom from the real meaning of being female; it was not just another style of being female. Being female meant tiny boundaries and degraded possibilities; social inferiority and sexual subordination; obedience to men; surrender to male force or violence; sexual accessibility to men or withdrawal from the world; and civil insignificance. Unlike the feminine virgins who accepted the social subordination while exempting themselves from the sex on which it was premised, Joan rejected the status and the sex as one thing—empirical synonyms: low civil status and being fucked as indistinguishable one from the other. She refused to be fucked and she refused civil insignificance: and it was one refusal; a rejection of the social meaning of being female in its entirety, no part of the feminine exempted and saved. Her virginity was a radical renunciation of a civil worthlessness rooted in real sexual practice. She refused to be female.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[femalethink]

Sexually liberal men support abortion for women not because they want women to be able to control their bodies but because they know that unrestricted abortions heighten women's availability to men for sex. And the sex sexually liberal men have in mind is not the kind that emerges from women's authentic desire for physical intimacy and pleasure. Instead, it is the male-controlled, male-defined sex of pornography, in which men are subjects and women are objects.

—Dorchen Leidholdt, The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism

[femalethink]

“Sexual liberalism”: a set of political beliefs and practices rooted in the assumption that sexual expression is inherently liberating and must be permitted to flourish unchecked, even when it entails the exploitation or brutalization of others. To sexual liberals, sexuality is not a construct of culture that reflects and reinforces a culture's values including its devaluation of women, as feminists contend, but an icon of nature, so fragile that any analysis, criticism, or attempt at change threatens not only the existence of human sexuality but everyone's freedom.

—Dorchen Leidholdt, The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism

[femalethink]

From the time of Marx to the present, male hegemony and male supremacy in revolutionary organizations themselves have gone practically untouched, if not unchallenged. The brutality of the treatment of Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin; the sneers, snickers, jokes, aspersions; the accusations of being ugly, nasty, domineering and unfeminine; the hypocritical forms of discrimination—all are as prevalent today as they were in German Social Democracy. The so-called “woman question” is like a searchlight cast upon these movements, revealing that they preserve bourgeois ideology and bourgeois class interests within the proletariat, however much their revisionism is hidden behind quotations from Peking Review.

—Marlene Dixon, “Left-Wing Anti-Feminism: A Revisionist Disorder.”

[femalethink]

The advantages that accrue to the men of the labor aristocracy also accrue to the men who claim they are Communists (and who are, in most cases, men of the petty bourgeoisie where anti-feminism is supremely the order of the day).

—Marlene Dixon,“Left-Wing Anti-Feminism: A Revisionist Disorder.”

[femalethink]

With the demise of the subsistence economy that had prevailed in pre-capitalist Europe, the unity of production and reproduction which has been typical of all societies based on production-for-use came to an end, as these activities became the carriers of different social relations and were sexually differentiated. In the new monetary regime, only production-for-market was defined as a value-creating activity, whereas the reproduction of the worker began to be considered as valueless from an economic viewpoint and even ceased to be considered as work. Reproductive work continued to be paid—though at the lowest rates—when performed for the master class or outside the home. But the economic importance of the reproduction of labor-power carried out in the home, and its function in the accumulation of capital became invisible, being mystified as a natural vocation and labeled "women's labor." In addition, women were excluded from many waged occupations and, when they worked for a wage, they earned a pittance compared to the average male wage.

These historic changes—that peaked in the 19th century with the creation of the full-time housewife—redefined women's position in society and in relation to men.The sexual division of labor that emerged from it not only fixed women to reproductive work, but increased their dependence on men, enabling the state and employers to use the male wage as a means to command women's labor. In this way, the separation of commodity production from the reproduction of labor-power also made possible the development of a specifically capitalist use of the wage and of the markets as means for the accumulation of unpaid labor.

Most importantly, the separation of production from reproduction created a class of proletarian women who were as dispossessed as men but, unlike their male relatives, in a society that was becoming increasingly monetarized, had almost no access to wages, thus being forced into a condition of chronic poverty, economic dependence, and invisibility as workers.

—Silvia Federici, “Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.”