This diseased view of woman as the negative of man, “female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities, ” infects the whole of culture. It is the cancer in the gut of every political and
economic system, of every social institution. It is the rot which
spoils all human relationships, infests all human psychological
reality, and destroys the very fiber of human identity.
This pathological view of female negativity has been enforced on our flesh for thousands of years. The savage mutilation of the female body, undertaken to distinguish us absolutely from men, has occurred on a massive scale. For instance, in China, for one thousand years, women’s feet were
reduced to stumps through footbinding. When a girl was seven
or eight years old, her feet were washed in alum, a chemical
that causes shrinkage. Then, all toes but the big toes were bent
into the soles of her feet and bandaged as tightly as possible.
This procedure was repeated over and over again for approximately three years. The girl, in agony, was forced to walk on her feet. Hard calluses formed; toenails grew into the skin;
the feet were pus-filled and bloody; circulation was virtually
stopped; often the big toes fell off. The ideal foot was three
inches of smelly, rotting flesh. Men were positive and women
were negative because men could walk and women could not.
Men were strong and women were weak because men could
walk and women could not. Men were independent and
women were dependent because men could walk and women
could not. Men were virile because women were crippled.
This atrocity committed against Chinese women is only one
example of the systematic sadism acted out on the bodies of
women to render us opposite to, and the negatives of, men.
We have been, and are, whipped, beaten, and assaulted; we
have been, and are, encased in clothing designed to distort our
bodies, to make movement and breathing painful and difficult;
we have been, and are, turned into ornaments, so deprived of
physical presence that we cannot run or jump or climb or even
walk with a natural posture; we have been, and are, veiled, our
faces covered by layers of suffocating cloth or by layers of
make-up, so that even possession of our own faces is denied us;
we have been, and are, forced to remove the hair from our
armpits, legs, eyebrows, and often even from our pubic areas,
so that men can assert, without contradiction, the positivity of
their own hairy virility. We have been, and are, sterilized
against our will; our wombs are removed for no medical reason; our clitorises are cut off; our breasts and the whole musculature of our chests are removed with enthusiastic abandon.
This last procedure, radical mastectomy, is eighty years old. I
ask you to consider the development of weaponry in the last
eighty years, nuclear bombs, poisonous gases, laser beams,
noise bombs, and the like, and to question the development of
technology in relation to women. Why are women still being
mutilated so promiscuously in breast surgery; why has this
savage form of mutilation, radical mastectomy, thrived if not
to enhance the negativity of women in relation to men? These
forms of physical mutilation are brands which designate us as
female by negating our very bodies, by destroying them.
In the bizarre world made by men, the primary physical
emblem of female negativity is pregnancy. Women have the
capacity to bear children; men do not. But since men are
positive and women are negative, the inability to bear children
is designated as a positive characteristic, and the ability to
bear children is designated as a negative characteristic. Since
women are most easily distinguished from men by virtue of
this single capacity, and since the negativity of women is always established in opposition to the positivity of men, the childbearing capacity of the female is used first to fix, then to
confirm, her negative or inferior status. Pregnancy becomes a
physical brand, a sign designating the pregnant one as authentically female. Childbearing, peculiarly, becomes the form and substance of female negativity.
Again, consider technology in relation to women. As men
walk on the moon and a man-made satellite approaches Mars
for a landing, the technology of contraception remains criminally inadequate. The two most effective means of contraception are the pill and the I. U. D. The pill is poisonous and the I. U. D. is sadistic. Should a woman want to prevent conception, she must either fail eventually because she uses an ineffective method of contraception, in which case she risks death through childbearing; or she must risk dreadful disease
with the pill, or suffer agonizing pain with the I. U. D. — and, of
course, with either of these methods, the risk of death is also
very real. Now that abortion techniques have been developed
which are safe and easy, women are resolutely denied free
access to them. Men require that women continue to become
pregnant so as to embody female negativity, thus confirming
male positivity.
While the physical assaults against female life are staggering, the outrages committed against our intellectual and creative faculties have been no less sadistic. Consigned to a negative intellectual and creative life, so as to affirm these capacities in men, women are considered to be mindless; femininity is
roughly synonymous with stupidity. We are feminine to the
degree that our mental faculties are annihilated or repudiated.
To enforce this dimension of female negativity, we are systematically denied access to formal education, and every assertion of natural intelligence is punished until we do not dare to trust our perceptions, until we do not dare to honor our
creative impulses, until we do not dare to exercise our critical
faculties, until we do not dare to cultivate our imaginations,
until we do not dare to respect our own mental or moral
acuity. Whatever creative or intellectual work we do manage
to do is trivialized, ignored, or ridiculed, so that even those
few whose minds could not be degraded are driven to suicide
or insanity, or back into marriage and childbearing. There are
very few exceptions to this inexorable rule.
The most vivid literary manifestation of this pathology of
female negation is found in pornography. Literature is always
the most eloquent expression of cultural values; and pornography articulates the purest distillation of those values. In literary pornography, where female blood can flow without the real restraint of biological endurance, the ethos of this murderous male-positive culture is revealed in its skeletal form: male sadism feeds on female masochism; male dominance is
nourished by female submission.
In pornography, sadism is the means by which men establish their dominance. Sadism is the authentic exercise of power which confirms manhood; and the first characteristic of manhood is that its existence is based on the negation of the female