stay within the survivor’s own perspective. This will
perhaps bother the historian, with his distrust of
personal evidence; but radical suffering transcends
relativity, and when one survivor’s account of an
event or circumstance is repeated in exactly the same
way by dozens of other survivors, men and women
in different camps, from different nations and cultures, then one comes to trust the validity of such reports and even to question rare departures from
the general view . 2
Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor:
An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps
The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical
butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical
mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and the other commonplaces of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the
mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No
matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or
eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been
whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they
were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed,
threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of
female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt. Because women’s testimony is not and cannot be validated by the witness of men who have experienced the same events and given
them the same value, the very reality of abuse sustained by
women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is
negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is
negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those
who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.
The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the exis-
tence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her
suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of
women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real
the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim
to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some
thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual
woman m ultiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete
existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own
suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life,
whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing w ill ever make up for it.
No one can bear to live a meaningless life. Women fight for
meaning just as women fight for survivaclass="underline" by attaching themselves
to men and the values honored by men. By committing themselves
to male values, women seek to acquire value. By advocating male
meaning, women seek to acquire meaning. Subservient to male
w ill, women believe that subservience itself is the meaning of a
female life. In this w ay, women, whatever they suffer, do not suffer the anguish of a conscious recognition that, because they are women, they have been robbed of volition and choice, without
which no life can have meaning.
*
The political Right in the United States today makes certain metaphysical and material promises to women that both exploit and quiet some of women’s deepest fears. These fears originate in the
perception that male violence against women is uncontrollable and
unpredictable. Dependent on and subservient to men, women are
always subject to this violence. The Right promises to put enforceable restraints on male aggression, thus sim plifying survival for women— to make the world slightly more habitable, in other
words— by offering the following:
Form. Women experience the world as mystery. Kept ignorant
of technology, economics, most of the practical skills required to
function autonomously, kept ignorant of the real social and sexual
demands made on women, deprived of physical strength, excluded
from forums for the development of intellectual acuity and public
self-confidence, women are lost and mystified by the savage momentum of an ordinary life. Sounds, signs, promises, threats, w ildly crisscross, but what do they mean? The Right offers women
a simple, fixed, predetermined social, biological, and sexual order.
Form conquers chaos. Form banishes confusion. Form gives ignorance a shape, makes it look like something instead of nothing.
Shelter. Women are brought up to maintain a husband’s home
and to believe that women without men are homeless. Women
have a deep fear of being homeless—at the mercy of the elements
and of strange men. The Right claims to protect the home and the
woman’s place in it.
Safety. For women, the world is a very dangerous place. One
wrong move, even an unintentional smile, can bring disaster—assault, shame, disgrace. The Right acknowledges the reality of danger, the validity of fear. The Right then manipulates the fear. The promise is that if a woman is obedient, harm will not befall her.
Rules. Living in a world she has not made and docs not understand, a woman needs rules to know what to do next. If she knows what she is supposed to do, she can find a way to do it. If
she learns the rules by rote, she can perform with apparent effortlessness, which will considerably enhance her chances for survival. The Right, very considerately, tells women the rules of the game on which their lives depend. The Right also promises that,
despite their absolute sovereignty, men too will follow specified
rules.
Love. Love is always crucial in effecting the allegiance of women.
The Right offers women a concept of love based on order and stability, with formal areas of mutual accountability. A woman is loved for fulfilling her female functions: obedience is an expression
of love and so are sexual submission and childbearing. In return,
the man is supposed to be responsible for the material and emotional well-being of the woman. And, increasingly, to redeem the cruel inadequacies of mortal men, the Right offers women the love
of Jesus, beautiful brother, tender lover, compassionate friend, perfect healer of sorrow and resentment, the one male to whom one can submit absolutely— be Woman as it were— without being sexually violated or psychologically abused.