women to adhere to conservative or right-wing or orthodox Judaism or conservative or right-wing or fundamentalist or orthodox Christianity; and within the frame of male domination, there is
good reason for women to hate homosexuality, both male and
female.
* Charles Darwin, whose ideas are as radical and as central to the contemporary epoch as are Freud’s and Marx’s, was not a Jew, but never mind.
Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of a neo-Nazi movement that is getting
powerful in the United States, claims that “the Zionist evil” is one of the
“key arms of the British intelligence body which is behind the operation to
destroy America” and that the Anti-Defamation League is “literally the
Gestapo of the British secret intelligence” in the United States. In the
propaganda of Lyndon LaRouche, who has been behind such diverse
groups as the U . S. Labor Party, the Fusion Energy Foundation, the
National Democratic Policy Committee, and the National Anti-Drug
Coalition, “British” is virtually a synonym for “Jewish. ” (See “Lyndon
LaRouche’s Goon Squads, ” Alan Crawford, Inquiry, February 15, 1982,
pp. 8 - 1 0 . ) “Creationism” (God created the world in seven days, there was
no evolution) is a main tenet of the orthodox (not neo-Nazi) Right; the
ideas of Darwin are as despised as the ideas of Freud and Marx.
Women are interchangeable as sex objects; women are slightly
less disposable as mothers. The only dignity and value women get
is as mothers: it is a compromised dignity and a low value, but it is
all that is offered to women as women. Having children is the best
thing women can do to get respect and be assured a place. The fact
that having children does not get women respect or a place is almost beside the point: poor women don’t get respect and live in dung heaps; black women don’t get respect and are jailed in decimated ghettos; just plain pregnant women don’t get respect and the place they have is a dangerous one— pregnancy is now considered
a cause of battery (stress on the male, don’t you know): in perhaps
25 percent of families in which battery occurs, it is a pregnant
woman who has been battered. In fact, having children may mean
both increased violence and increased dependence; it may significantly worsen the economic circumstances of a woman or a fam ily; it may hurt a woman’s health or jeopardize her in a host of other
ways; but having children is the one social contribution credited to
women— it is the bedrock of women’s social worth. Despite all the
happy smiling public mommies, the private mommies have grim
private recognitions. One perception is particularly chilling: without the children, I am not worth much. The recognition is actually more dramatic than that, much more chilling: without the children, I am not. Right-wing Judaism and right-wing Christianity both guarantee that women will continue to have a place outside
history but inside the home: through childbearing. Without that,
women know they have nothing. Homosexuality for women means
having nothing; it means extinction. Well, who’s going to have the
babies? men ask when faced with women surgeons and politicians— as if the question had an intrinsic logic; or as if ending war were not logically a part of having “enough” people. “All this talk,
for and against and about babies, ” wrote Charlotte Perkins G ilman, “is by men. One would think the men bore the babies, nursed the babies, reared the babies.. . . The women bear and
rear the children. The men kill them. Then they say: ‘We are run
ning short of children—make some more. ’” 14 The extinction
women fear is not this extinction men conjure up: who will make
the babies so that we can fight our wars? It is the extinction of
women: women’s function and with it women’s worth. Men have
one reason for keeping women alive: to bear babies. The sex of
domination leads to death: it is the killing of body and w ill—conquest, possession, annihilation; sex, violence, death—that is pure sex; and it is the slow annihilation of the woman’s will that is eros,
and the slow annihilation of her body that is eros; her violation is
sex, whether it ends in her aesthetic disappearance into oblivion or
her body bludgeoned in a newspaper photograph or the living husk
used and discarded as sexual garbage. Annihilation is sexy, and sex
tends toward it; women are the preferred victims of record. Only
having children moderates men’s sexual usage of women: use them
up and throw them away, fuck them to death, killing them softly.
If women are not needed to run the country or write the books or
make the music or to farm or engineer or dig coal or fix plumbing
or cure the sick or plav basketball, what are women needed for? If
the absence of women from all these areas, from all areas, is not
perceived as loss, emptiness, poverty, what are women for? Right-
wing women have faced the answer. Women are for fucking and
having children. Fucking gets you dead, unless you have children
too. Homosexuality—its rise in public visibility, attempts to socially legitimize or protect it, a sense that it is attractive and on the move and winning not only acceptance but practitioners—makes
women expendable: the one thing women can do and be valued for
will no longer be valued, cannot be counted on to be that bedrock
of women’s worth. This is true of both lesbianism and male homosexuality, in that both negate women’s reproductive value to men; but male homosexuality is especially terrifying because it suggests
a world without women altogether—a world in which women are
extinct. “[I]n sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, ” God cursed
Adam’s woman (Genesis 3: 16)— she is referred to as “the woman”
until she and Adam are expelled from Eden and Adam names her
Eve “because she was the mother of all living” (Genesis 3: 20). On
expulsion from Eden man knew sex leading to death; and woman
knew childbearing in sorrow and pain, on which her well-being,
such as it is, still depends. The sorrow was apparently avoided
altogether by Phyllis Schlafly, who waxes euphoric on having children: “None of those measures of career success [traveling to “exciting faraway places, ” having authority over others, winning, or earning a fortune] can compare with the thrill, the satisfaction, and
the fun of having and caring for babies, and watching them respond and grow under a mother’s loving care. More babies m ultiply a woman’s jo y . ” 15 The thrill, the endlessly m ultiplying joy, was not in God’s original intention; and indeed, it is unlikely that