the female, even as it has survived under slave conditions.
Within the confines of the male-positive system, this eroticism
does not exist. After all, a negative is a negative is a negative.
Fucking is entirely a male act designed to affirm the reality
and power of the phallus, of masculinity. For women, the
pleasure in being fucked is the masochistic pleasure of experiencing self-negation. Under the male-positive system, the masochistic pleasure of self-negation is both mythicized and
mystified in order to compel women to believe that we experience fulfillment in selflessness, pleasure in pain, validation in self-sacrifice, femininity in submission to masculinity. Trained
from birth to conform to the requirements of this peculiar
world view, punished severely when we do not learn masochistic submission well enough, entirely encapsulated inside the boundaries of the male-positive system, few women ever experience themselves as real in and of themselves. Instead, women are real to themselves to the degree that they identify
with and attach themselves to the positivity of males. In being
fucked, a woman attaches herself to one who is real to himself
and vicariously experiences reality, such as it is, through him;
in being fucked, a woman experiences the masochistic pleasure of her own negation which is perversely articulated as the fulfillment of her femininity.
Now, I want to make a crucial distinction— the distinction
between truth and reality. For humans, reality is social', reality
is whatever people at a given time believe it to be. In saying
this, I do not mean to suggest that reality is either whimsical or
accidental. In my view, reality is always a function of politics
in general and sexual politics in particular— that is, it serves
the powerful by fortifying and justifying their right to domination over the powerless. Reality is whatever premises social and cultural institutions are built on. Reality is also the rape,
the whip, the fuck, the hysterectomy, the clitoridectomy, the
mastectomy, the bound foot, the high-heel shoe, the corset, the
make-up, the veil, the assault and battery, the degradation and
mutilation in their concrete manifestations. Reality is enforced
by those whom it serves so that it appears to be self-evident.
Reality is self-perpetuating, in that the cultural and social institutions built on its premises also embody and enforce those premises. Literature, religion, psychology, education, medicine, the science of biology as currently understood, the social sciences, the nuclear family, the nation-state, police, armies,
and civil law— all embody the given reality and enforce it on
us. The given reality is, of course, that there are two sexes,
male and female; that these two sexes are opposite from each
other, polar; that the male is inherently positive and the female inherently negative; and that the positive and negative poles of human existence unite naturally into a harmonious
whole.
Truth, on the other hand, is not nearly so accessible as
reality. In my view, truth is absolute in that it does exist and it
can be found. Radium, for instance, always existed; it was
always true that radium existed; but radium did not figure in
the human notion of reality until Marie and Pierre Curie isolated it. When they did, the human notion of reality had to change in fundamental ways to accommodate the truth of
radium. Similarly, the earth was always a sphere; this was
always true; but until Columbus sailed west to find the East, it
was not real. We might say that truth does exist, and that it is
the human project to find it so that reality can be based on
it.
I have made this distinction between truth and reality in
order to enable me to say something very simple: that while
the system of gender polarity is real, it is not true. It is not true
that there are two sexes which are discrete and opposite, which
are polar, which unite naturally and self-evidently into a harmonious whole. It is not true that the male embodies both positive and neutral human qualities and potentialities in contrast to the female who is female, according to Aristotle and all of male culture, “by virtue of a certain lack of qualities. ”
And once we do not accept the notion that men are positive
and women are negative, we are essentially rejecting the notion that there are men and women at all. In other words, the system based on this polar model of existence is absolutely
real; but the model itself is not true. We are living imprisoned
inside a pernicious delusion, a delusion on which all reality as
we know it is predicated.
In my view, those of us who are women inside this system of
reality will never be free until the delusion of sexual polarity is
destroyed and until the system of reality based on it is eradicated entirely from human society and from human memory.
This is the notion of cultural transformation at the heart of
feminism. This is the revolutionary possibility inherent in the
feminist struggle.
As I see it, our revolutionary task is to destroy phallic identity in men and masochistic nonidentity in women—that is, to destroy the polar realities of men and women as we now know
them so that this division of human flesh into two camps— one
an armed camp and the other a concentration camp— is no
longer possible. Phallic identity is real and it must be destroyed. Female masochism is real and it must be destroyed.
The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations— for instance, law, art, religion, nationstates, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right—
these institutions are real and they must be destroyed. If they
are not, we will be consigned as women to perpetual inferiority and subjugation.
I believe that freedom for women must begin in the repudiation of our own masochism. I believe that we must destroy in ourselves the drive to masochism at its sexual roots. I believe
that we must establish our own authenticity, individually and
among ourselves— to experience it, to create from it, and also
to deprive men of occasions for reifying the lie of manhood
over and against us. I believe that ridding ourselves of our
own deeply entrenched masochism, which takes so many tortured forms, is the first priority; it is the first deadly blow that we can strike against systematized male dominance. In effect,
when we succeed in excising masochism from our own personalities and constitutions, we will be cutting the male life line to power over and against us, to male worth in contradistinction to female degradation, to male identity posited on brutally enforced female negativity— we will be cutting the
male life line to manhood itself. Only when manhood is dead
— and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it— only then will we know what it is to be free.