Behind the smoke screen of ideal idleness, there is always
women’s work. Women’s work, first, is marriage. “In the morning
I’m always nervous, ” Carolina de Jesus wrote. “I’m afraid of not
getting money to buy food to eat.. . . Senhor Manuel showed up
saying he wanted to marry me. But I don’t want to. . . a man isn’t
going to like a woman who can’t stop reading and gets out of bed to
write and sleeps with paper and pencil under her pillow. T hat’s
why I prefer to live alone, for m y ideals. ” 21
The woman in marriage is often in marriage because her ideal is
eating, not writing.
Women’s work, second, is prostitution: sexual service outside of
marriage for money. “I’d like so much to have the illusion that I
had some freedom of choice, ” said J . in Kate M illett’s The P rostitution Papers. “M aybe it’s just an illusion, but I need to think I had some freedom. Yet then I realize how much was determined in the
way I got into prostitution, how determined m y life had been, how
fucked over I was. . . So I believed I’d chosen it. W hat’s most
terrifying is to look back, to realize what I went through and that I
endured it. ” 22
The woman in prostitution learns, as Linda Lovelace said in
Ordeal, “to settle for the smallest imaginable triumphs, the absence
of pain or the momentary lessening of terror. ” 23 The woman in
prostitution is often in prostitution because her ideal is physical
survival— surviving the pimp, surviving poverty, having nowhere
to go.
Women’s social condition is built on a simple premise: women
can be fucked and bear babies, therefore women must be fucked
and bear babies. Sometimes, especially among the sophisticated,
“penetrated” is substituted for “fucked”: women can be penetrated,
therefore women must be penetrated. This logic does not apply to
men, whichever word is used: men can be fucked, therefore men
must be fucked; men can be penetrated, therefore men must be
penetrated. This logic applies only to women and sex. One does
not say, for instance, women have delicate hands, therefore women
must be surgeons. Or women have legs, therefore women must
run, jump, climb. Or women have minds, therefore women must
use them. One does learn, however, that women have sex organs
that must be used by men, or the women are not women: they are
somehow less or more, either of which is bad and thoroughly discouraged. Women are defined, valued, judged, in one way only: as women—that is, with sex organs that must be used. Other parts of
the body do not signify, unless used in sex or as an indicator of
sexual availability or desirability. Intelligence does not count. It
has nothing to do with what a woman is.
Women are born into the labor pool specific to women: the labor
is sex. Intelligence does not modify, reform, or revolutionize this
basic fact of life for women.
Women are marked for marriage and prostitution by a wound
between the legs, acknowledged as such when men show their
strange terror of women. Intelligence neither creates nor destroys
this wound; nor does it change the uses of the wound, the woman,
the sex.
Women’s work is done below the waist; intelligence is higher.
Women are lower; men are higher. It is a simple, dull scheme; but
women’s sex organs in and of themselves are apparently appalling
enough to justify the scheme, make it self-evidently true.
The natural intelligence of women, however expanded by what
women manage to learn despite their low status, manifests in surviving: enduring, marking time, bearing pain, becoming numb, absorbing loss—especially loss of self. Women survive men’s use of them—marriage, prostitution, rape; women’s intelligence expresses
itself in finding ways to endure and find meaning in the unendurable, to endure being used because of one’s sex. “Sex with men, how can I say, lacks the personal, ” 24 wrote Maryse Holder in Give
Sorrow Words.
Some women want to work: not sex labor; real work; work that
men, those real humans, do for a living wage. T hey want an honest wage for honest work. One of the prostitutes Kate M illett interviewed made $800 a week in her prime. “With a P h. D. and after ten years’ experience in teaching, ” M illet wrote, “I was permitted
to make only $60 a w eek. ” 25
Women’s work that is not marriage or prostitution is mostly
segregated, always underpaid, stagnant, sex-stereotyped. In the
United States in 1981 women earned 56 to 59 percent of what men
earned. Women are paid significantly less than men for doing comparable work. It is not easy to find comparable work. The consequences of this inequity— however the percentages read in any given year, in any given country— are not new for women. Unable
to sell sex-neutral labor for a living wage, women must sell sex.
“To subordinate women in a social order in which she must work in
order to l i v e ” Jenny D’Hericourt wrote French socialist Joseph
Proudhon in the mid-1800s, “is to desire prostitution; for disdain
of the producer extends to the value of the product;. . . The
woman who cannot live by working, can only do so by prostituting
herself; the equal of man or a courtesan, such is the alternative. ” 26
Proudhon’s egalitarian vision could not be stretched to include
women. He wrote D’Hericourt:
. . . I do not admit that, whatever reparation may be due to
woman, of joint thirds with her husband (or father) and her
children, the most rigorous justice can ever make her the
EQUAL of man;. . . neither do I admit that this inferiority of
the female sex constitutes for it either servitude, or hum iliation, or a diminution of dignity, liberty, or happiness. I maintain that the contrary is true. 27
D’Hericourt’s argument constructs the world of women: women
must work for fair wages in nonsexual labor or they must sell
themselves to men; the disdain of men for women makes the work
of women worth less simply because women do it; the devaluation
of women’s work is predetermined by the devaluation of women as
a sex class; women end up having to sell themselves because men
will not buy labor from them that is not sex labor at wages that
will enable women to divest themselves of sex as a form of labor.
Proudhon’s answer constructs the world of men: in the best of all
possible worlds—acknowledging that some economic discrimination against women has taken place—no justice on earth can make women equal to men because women are inferior to men: this inferiority does not humiliate or degrade women; women find happiness, dignity, and liberty in this inequality precisely because they are women—that is the nature of women; women are being treated