“So…how do you torture a woman? Well, you can tie her up on the rack and rip her bones apart from the sockets. That’s one way. Or you can tear apart her mind and her body. Now, there’s two ways to do this: You can pry her body away from her mind, or you can pry her mind away from her body. Either way, it works out to the same thing – you stop the woman. She can think but not act, or she can act but not think. To pry her body away from her mind, you need to physically humiliate her. Of course, rape is the most traditional method, but it’s not the only one, by any means. You can ridicule her body, or make fun of the things she does. You can make her self-conscious about her looks. You can make her strap her breasts in. You can make her embarrassed about her periods. You can make her frightened of puberty, frightened of sex, frightened of aging, frightened of eating. You can terrorize her with her own body, and then she will torture herself. Now, if you want to pry her mind apart from her body, you have to make her believe she’s crazy. I mean, you can haul her into a courtroom and have all the experts certify that she’s mentally incompetent, but again – there are a lot of other ways to go about this. You can just annul her. We all know how that goes: Interrupt her, change the subject, ignore her, patronize her, trivialize her, dismiss her. You can deprive her of her history – oh, does she have one? – of her art – where are the women artists? – of her spiritual traditions – you mean there’s something other than fathers and sons? You can restrict her contact with other women. You can have a fit over women-only space – as if the whole rest of the world wasn’t “male dominant”! You can lie to her so chronically and so comprehensively, that the lie becomes the entire context for her existence. It’s really not terribly difficult to make a woman believe she’s crazy, if you control all the resources. And if you’re a real expert at torture, you can do both at the same time. You can offer to love her body, if she’ll just give up her mind. Or you can offer to love her mind, and, at the same time, reject her body.”
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