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The oppression of human groups arises from and mirrors our oppression of other species and involves a similar reduction, domination, and “animalization” of the total being; and both are rooted in our disrespect for and rape of nature. Oppression itself involves the systematic overdetermination of one group by another. It involves spiritual and material domination of one group by another. With oppression, one group - the elite - systematically reduces the “others” to objects to be characterized, used, and in some cases even disposed of. With oppression, one group has the power to realize their choices and to name the world in order to change the world, while the other has these choices, these names, and this world imposed on them. The oppression of women, like all oppression, begins with this objectification and domination. We are not dealing with anything as simplistic as sex role division but something as complex and fundamental as the dehumanization animalization/reification of one entire sex. […] [W]e are living in man’s world, in which woman is relegated to the position of absolute Other. Man is seen as transcendence, woman as immanence; man as for-itself, woman as in-itself; man as human, woman as nature; man as positive thrust, woman as lack. Man looks on woman from his vantage point and reduces her to a being that is not for-itself but for-him. He establishes ideologies and hierarchies that reproduce and legitimate his own objectifying stance. In the world that elite males create and that other men and elite women are at once privileged and victimized by, women are less than men; Black and Red men are less than white men; “Black and Red men’s women” are less than the “white men’s women”; the working class are less than the ruling class; nature is an expendable commodity to be exploited; and the objectifying stance on which all this is based is celebrated as the scientific method and seen as the sine qua non of human progress.

Burstow, B 1992, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence, SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, p 3.

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[T]here can be no mechanical intensification of arousal of the clitoris through friction during coitus, and the transfer of the arousal from the clitoris to the vagina is purely psychological…Women know this, as their substitute techniques prove.  They try to maintain the illusion of enjoying sexual intercourse vaginally by holding the thighs together, thus establishing artificial contact between penis and clitoris, or they pretend to be highly excited, producing acrobatic movements only to achieve the same aim of penis-clitoris contact…If a woman, as an adult person, maintains erogeneity only of the clitoris, she is neurotically ill.

Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax (p. 27).

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“[A ] useful list that Sheila Jeffreys was often fond of drawing up in her Sexual Politics classes as a way of exposing the superficiality of arguments around “choice” and abortion. She would write up a version of the following: 1) Choose to be sexual or not. 2) If yes, choose to have sex with another person, or not. 3) If yes, choose to have same-sex or opposite-sex sexual relations. 4) If opposite sex, choose whether or not to have coitus. 5) If yes, choose affordable, accessible and safe contraception, or not. 6) If no, or if contraception fails, choose an abortion, or not. Her point was, that if the options from 1-5 cannot also be freely chosen then there is little point in considering abortion simply as a “choice.” The problem goes beyond the more obvious end of reproductive rights and back to women’s sexual autonomy.

Meagan Tyler in Sex & Zika: On contraception and the coital imperative x 

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The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.  When relationships are determined by manipulation, by the need for control, they may possess a dreary, bickering kind of drama, but they cease to be interesting. They are repetitious; the shock of human possibilities has ceased to reverberate through them. When someone tells me a piece of truth which has been withheld from me, and which I needed in order to see my life more clearly, it may bring acute pain, but it can also flood me with a cold, seasharp wash of relief. Often such truths come by accident, or from strangers. It isn’t that to have an honourable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that i can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.

Adrienne Rich in Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying (1975)

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The liar may resist confrontation, denying that she lied. Or she may use other language: forgetfulness, privacy, the protection of someone else. Or, she may bravely declare herself a coward. This allows her to go on lying, since that is what cowards do. She does not say, I was afraid, since this would open the question of other ways of handling her fear. It would open the question of what is actually feared. She may say, I didn’t want to cause pain. What she really did not want is to have to deal with the other’s pain. The lie is a short-cut through another’s personality.

Adrienne Rich in Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying (1975)

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Why do we feel slightly crazy when we realise we have been lied to in a relationship? We take so much of the universe on trust. You tell me: “In 1950 I lived on the north side of Beacon Street in Somerville”. You tell me: “She and I were lovers, but for months now we have only been good friends”. You tell me: “It is seventy degrees outside and the sun is shining”. Because I love you, because there is not even a question of lying between us, I take these accounts of the universe on trust: your address twenty-five years ago, your relationship with someone I know only on sight, this morning’s weather. I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you. I also have faith that you are telling me things it is important I should know; that you do not conceal facts from me in an effort to spare me, or yourself, pain. Or, at the very least, that you will say, “There are things I am not telling you”. When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the whole instinct and concept of trust. For awhile, we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting edge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship, or naming, or tenderness exist; we are brought close to formlessness.

Adrienne Rich in Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying (1975)

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There are phrases which help us not to admit we are lying: “my privacy”, “nobody’s business but my own”. The choices that underlie these phrases may indeed be justified; but we ought to think about the full meaning and consequences of such language. Women’s love for women has been represented almost entirely through silence and lies. The institution of heterosexuality has forced the lesbian to dissemble, or be labeled a pervert, a criminal, a sick or dangerous woman, etc etc. The lesbian, then, has often been forced to lie, like the prostitute or the married women. Does a life “in the closet” - lying, perhaps of necessity, about ourselves to bosses, landlords, clients, colleagues, family, because the law and public opinion are founded on a lie - does this, can it, spread into private life, so that lying (described as discretion) becomes an easy way to avoid conflict or complication? Can it become a strategy so ingrained that it is used even with close friends and lovers? Heterosexuality as an institution has also drowned in silence the erotic feelings between women. I myself lived half a lifetime in the lie of that denial. That silence makes us all, to some degree, into liars. When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

Adrienne Rich in Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying (1975)

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Lying is done with words, and also with silence. The woman who tells lies in her personal relationships may or may not plan or invent her lying. She may not even think of what she is doing in a calculated way.  A subject is raised which the liar wishes buried. She has to go downstairs, her parking meter will have run out. Or, there is a telephone call she ought to have made an hour ago. She is asked, point-blank, a question which may lead into painful talk: “How do you feel about what is happening between us?” Instead of trying to describe her feelings in their ambiguity and confusion, she asks, “How do you feel?” The other, because she is trying to establish a ground of openness and trust, begins describing her own feelings. Thus the liar learns more than she tells. And she may also tell herself a lie: that she is concerned with the other’s feelings, not with her own. But the liar is concerned with her own feelings. The liar lives in fear of losing control. She cannot even desire a relationship without manipulation, since to be vulnerable to another person means for her the loss of control. The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness.

Adrienne Rich in Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying (1975)

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Rosalyn Diprose (1994) does a very good job of showing how and why the Lockean view of the self as stable over time, as distinct from the body, as owning property in the body, as possessing a self-contained identity prior to relations with others, and as establishing social relationships ‘without affecting the respective identities of the different parties involved’ (9–10), should be discarded. Under the Lockean model, being a sexual subject is distorted into the notion of possessing certain sexual attributes or objects (the female sexualised body as a whole becomes the object or possession in the case of women) which one can manage as one wishes. The problem with such a view is that it separates out self from body and sexual identity from sexualised body, in a way which would imply that one’s self or subjectivity is essentially separate from, and of a different nature to, one’s body. This essential and disembodied self is then viewed as the true self which remains constant over time, irrespective of what happens to the body, which is viewed as accidental, secondary and an add-on (sometimes cumbersome, sometimes beneficial) to the real self. The Lockean view of the self depends on a Cartesian split between live spirit and dead matter, between mental, true self and material, inessential body. On this model, rape leaves the true or mental self of the victim in tact; it happens only to the inessential body which can be viewed as analogous to any piece of property. The damage of rape is then very similar to having one’s property used unlawfully or without one’s proper consent. One’s rightful and permanent ownership is not fundamentally disputed and one’s status as owner is not dramatically damaged or infringed upon. One’s possession is not stolen; it is simply used without permission, on a temporary basis. If rape is viewed in this light, it becomes very hard to prove that rape is very damaging to the selfhood of the victim, and that a huge amount of harm is inflicted, because ‘self’ and ‘body’ are sharply and problematically distinguished (Diprose, 1994: 9). On this view, something like rape cannot affect a person’s subject status in the long run because one’s subjectivity is fundamentally separate from one’s body and its attributes, including its sexual ones.

du, TL 2009, A Philosophical Investigation of Rape: The Making and Unmaking of the Feminine Self, Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon., pp. 40-41.

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The fact that our understanding of Homo Sapiens has incorporated the perspective of only half of the human race makes it clear that women’s studies is not an additional knowledge merely to be tacked on to the curriculum. It is, instead, a body of knowledge that is perspective transforming and should therefore transform the existing curriculum from within and revise received notions of what constitutes an ‘objective’ or ‘normative’ perspective. (Langland and Gove, 1981, p. 3)

Feminism and Legal Method: The Difference it Makes, by Mary Jane Mossman [MA, & Thomadsen, NS (eds) 2012, At the Boundaries of Law : Feminism and Legal Theory, Routledge, London]

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The construction of sexuality and desire results from a complex interplay between culture (language), the psyche, and the body and it is precisely the deconstruction of sex-as-natural that feminists (e.g. Campbell 1980; Coward 1984), historians (e.g. Weeks 1981), psychoanalysts (e.g. Mitchell 1975), and philosophers (e.g. Foucault 1979a) have managed to achieve. Hollway (1984), for example, has challenged the conceptualization of sex-as-natural and has argued that the discourse of the insatiable male sex drive empowers men and constructs women as the passive objects of desire. She goes further, however, to reveal that part of this discourse entails the belief that women are potentially powerful and dangerous, and that they can ‘swallow up’ men who show weakness. Hence men’s desire is constructed as omnipotent yet vulnerable to the wiles of women who, although appearing passive, will castrate them emotionally if they can. Men must therefore resist women on an emotional level, whilst exploiting them fully on a sexual level. The ideal therefore becomes the unemotional but highly proficient (hetero)sexual stud. We need to consider how this widely disseminated discourse and its relationship to the everyday experiences of men (and women) relate to rape. It would follow that if all women are seen as having the thing that men most need, if they are also seen as grudging with it, or as so out of touch with their ‘real’ sexual feelings that they deny it to themselves and to men, then the problem for men is how to gain control of women’s sexuality in spite of women themselves. This is as much a scenario for ‘seduction’ as for rape, but rape also serves to avoid the potential ‘trap’ of emotionality. As with prostitution, the raped woman cannot assert her ‘misconceived’ power by trapping the man into commitment or love. In this formulation women’s sexuality is constructed as separate from women themselves. Figuratively speaking women are seen as having charge of something which is of greater value to men than to women themselves. At the same time women can enjoy sex ‘in spite of themselves’. So this sexuality of which they have charge is construed as an essence which can by-pass consciousness or which has a will of its own. This in turn allows for the construction of women’s consciousness simply as a one-dimensional prudery, an inappropriate moral standard imposed by mothers on daughters. It is not regarded as an expression of a woman’s will but rather the mouthing of a convention which defeats the woman’s own potential for sexual satisfaction. In other words if women say ‘no’ they do not really mean it.

Smart, C 2002, Feminism and the Power of Law, Routledge, London, pp. 29-30.

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Luce Irigaray’s analysis of the history of Western philosophy and psychoanalysis demonstrates in great detail how the masculine symbolic order is generated and sustained by the erasure of the ‘feminine’. For Irigaray, matricide is a compulsory condition of the phallogocentric economy; it is the mode by which the dominant symbolic enacts its desire to exclude the mother and assume her generativity. Her psychoanalytic reading of that economy is informed primarily by her insight that through a process of specularisation, man projects his ego on to the world which is then reflected back to him with his own image. Woman, as body and matter, stands in for that reflective mirror. It is the mother who is the primary support for the male imaginary, but because she also cannot be represented (because she is the mirror) she is symbolically murdered as part of the process by which man enters into culture. Woman is therefore simultaneously erased within the specular economy whilst also being an integral part upon which it is founded. This paradoxical dependence on and erasure of woman in culture is, as Irigaray suggests in the quotation above, a foundational contradiction upon which the whole ‘social scene’ rests.

Yvette Russell (2016) Woman’s Voice/Law’s Logos: The Rape Trial and the Limits of Liberal Reform, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 42:2, 284

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[A]n "idea" is a necessary precursor to a man's action in using a woman in prostitution. I want to distinguish my approach to prostitution from any that might see prostitution as natural, biologically driven, or inevitable. Sexological and most other approaches to prostitution start from the premise that men's behaviour in using women in prostitution is simply the acting out of a biological imperative. [...] Men are seen as doing what comes naturally. On the contrary, I consider that men's behaviour in choosing to use women in prostitution is socially constructed out of men's dominance and women's subordination. An "idea of prostitution" needs to exist in the heads of individual men to enable them to conceive of buying women for sex. This is the idea that woman exists to be so used, that it is a possible and appropriate way to use her. A necessary component of this idea is that it will be sexually exciting to so use a woman.

The Idea of Prostitution, Sheila Jeffreys (p. 3).

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In the nineties a rollback of social constructionism in the gay community carries on apace. In 1991 the research findings of Dr Simon LeVay, characterised as a ‘gay activist’, were published in the US. LeVay studied the brains of gay men who had died from AIDS and of men who claimed they were not gay who had died from the same cause. He found that a tiny area of the hypothalamus was on average twice as large in heterosexual men as in either heterosexual women or homosexual men. He suggested that varying hormone levels before birth ‘wired’ the hypothalamus for either heterosexuality or homosexuality. Since then another study at the University of California Medical School has apparently backed his findings. LeVay sees his work as really positive for ending discrimination against gays. He had always believed that homosexuality was biologically determined and set out to prove it so that anti- gay discrimination might be opposed on the grounds that gays were condemned by nature to their behaviour and must be treated with the mercy that should be shown to any group who cannot help themselves. This is an old argument which harks back to the turn of the century. It is an idea that dies hard. But it does not fit lesbian experience or lesbian feminist theory. LeVay has not yet had access to the brains of lesbians but is convinced that he will find that their brains resemble those of heterosexual men in the crucial area. It is significant that LeVay also believes that biology is responsible for differences between males and females in behaviour. He thinks that women are more verbally competent than men and men more spatially competent than women by reason of brain differences. He manages to associate these brain differences with the fact that gay men are ‘less strongly right-handed than straight men.’ LeVay is clearly prepared to believe that any number of stereotypical differences between men and women are the result of biology with no evidence whatsoever apart from his hunches. Most worryingly he believes that ‘male and female sex drives are biologically determined.’ One fundamental insight of feminist theory is that male sexual behaviour is learned and not natural. There would be no hope otherwise of women’s freedom from sexual violence. [...] LeVay shows us that biological arguments about ‘gay genes’ can lead directly into biological arguments that justify women’s oppression. It is worrying that the LeVay theory has been treated enthusiastically in some of the gay press and at least with sympathetic curiosity in the rest. The return to essentialism is in full swing it seems. Feminists have been particularly hostile to biological determinist explanations because the very idea of feminism, the possibility of its birth, depends on fighting the idea of biologically constructed psychological differences between the sexes. After a good grounding in such a battle it is not possible for lesbian feminists to be sanguine about biological explanations of homosexuality. Gay men can be because their freedom as men does not depend to the same extent on fighting biologism.

Sheila Jeffreys, The Lesbian Heresy, pp. 60-61. 

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It’s a bleak irony that if the pill’s inventors had been more concerned with women’s health, they might have taken much longer to develop it. One of the scientists involved, Gregory Pincus, tested a version of the pill on 15 psychiatric patients at the Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts. Early pills used far higher doses of hormones than modern contraceptives do, and during large-scale clinical trials in Puerto Rico, the side effects were so severe that a female doctor tried to halt the study, to no avail. “Pincus claimed that many of the women’s symptoms were psychosomatic,” May writes. As May makes clear, such abuses weren’t specific to the testing of the birth-control pill- they were common to all drug development. “By the standards of the day, the [Puerto Rico] studies were scrupulously conducted,” she writes. Furthermore, the women in Puerto Rico were hardly coerced; so many women were so desperate to control their fertility that the scientists had waiting lists of volunteers. Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that the creation of the pill often involved a cavalier attitude toward poor or sick women. May’s own father, Dr. Edward Tyler, actually held up federal approval of the pill because of concerns about its safety. The head of the Planned Parenthood Clinic in Los Angeles, he had used the same hormonal compounds found in the pill to treat various gynecological disorders and discovered that they often caused weight gain, abnormal bleeding, swelling, and other problems. But eventually, Tyler assured an official of the Food and Drug Administration “that his earlier concerns had been addressed, and that he was now convinced that Enovid, as the pill was called, ‘was safe.’” What changed his mind? May doesn’t say. In one of America and the Pill’s most interesting chapters, May asks whether men would tolerate the sorts of side effects that women have regularly experienced. The prospect of a male pill has appeared on the horizon various times over the last 50 years, but the issue of side effects scuttled every effort. Scientists, May reports, “actually discovered an effective vaccine that completely stopped the production of sperm without interfering with sex drive.” But it also made users’ testicles shrink by a third, so the researchers abandoned it, concluding, “The psychological trauma of shrinking testes just cannot be overcome.”

Goldberg, M 2010, ‘What the pill gave birth to’, The American Prospect, vol. 21 (4), pp. 50-53. x

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The story begins with Margaret Sanger (1879-1966), a complex heroine who for decades personified the cause of birth control and family planning. A fiery socialist in her early days, Sanger saw the gruesome consequences of unsafe abortion while working as a nurse in New York’s immigrant slums and, in defiance of federal law, called for access to birth control. Though genuinely motivated by a passion for women’s liberation, Sanger also embraced eugenics, a more respectable cause at the time than sexual freedom or feminist self-determination; indeed, after World War I, as Sanger’s biographer Ellen Chesler has written, “eugenics became a popular craze in this country- promoted in newspapers and magazines as a kind of secular religion.” Collaboration with eugenicists provided Sanger with powerful allies, but it wasn’t just a matter of convenience for her; she became an ardent advocate of population control for eugenic purposes. May quotes a letter that Sanger wrote to her friend and patron, the heiress Katharine Dexter McCormick: “I consider that the world and almost our civilization for the next twenty-five years, is going to depend upon a simple, cheap, safe, contraceptive to be used in poverty stricken slums, jungles, and among the most ignorant people.” She went on to call for immediate “national sterilization for certain dysgenic types.” One of the central tensions in Sanger’s work, then, was between her commitment to reproductive freedom and her willingness to sanction reproductive coercion. A similar tension is at work throughout the history May recounts. McCormick, a brilliant feminist who was the second woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, bankrolled the pill out of a commitment to women’s rights. But as May writes, the scientists and doctors who developed the pill never envisioned it as an agent of female emancipation. Rather, they “hailed it as a miracle drug that would solve the global problem of overpopulation, thereby reducing poverty and human misery, especially in the developing world.” They also hoped it would improve marital sex and domestic harmony, strengthening the nuclear family. In other words, they saw it as a tool for preserving existing power relations, not shaking them up.

Goldberg, M 2010, ‘What the pill gave birth to’, The American Prospect, vol. 21 (4), pp. 50-53. x

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[...] the sovereign decision, which suspends law in the state of exception and thus implicates bare life within it. […] once brought back to his proper place beyond both penal law and sacrifice, homo sacer presents the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign ban and preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted. […] What is captured in the sovereign ban is a human victim who may be killed but not sacrificed: homo sacer. […]The life caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originarily sacred--that is, that may be killed but not sacrificed--and, in this sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty.”

Agamben, G 1998, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp. 83.