policy to throw them aw ay. What is going to happen to women
when reproduction— the only capacity that women have that men
really need (Portnoy’s piece of liver can substitute for the rest in
hard times)— is no longer the exclusive province of the class
women? W hat is going to happen to women who have only one
argument for the importance of their existence— that their reproductive capacities are worth a little something (shelter, food, solace, minimal respect)— when men can make babies?
*
And yet, there is a solitude which each and every
one o f us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner
being which we call ourself, no eye nor touch o f man
or angel has ever pierced. It is more hidden than the
caves of the gnome; the sacred adytum o f the oracle;
the hidden chamber o f Eleusinian m ystery, for to it
only omniscience is permitted to enter.
Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take,
dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speech,
January 18, 1892
There is no thing named love in the world.
Women are dinks. Women are villains. They are
creatures akin to Communists and yellow-skinned
people and hippies. We march off to learn about
hand-to-hand combat. Blynton grins and teases and
hollers out his nursery rhyme: “If ya wanta live, ya
gotta be ag-ile, mo-bile, and hos-tile. ” We chant the
words: ag-ile, mo-bile, hos-tile. We make it all
rhyme.
Tim O’Brien, I f I Die in a Combat Zone
There are two models that essentially describe how women are
socially controlled and sexually used: the brothel model and the
farming model.
The brothel model relates to prostitution, narrowly defined;
women collected together for the purposes of sex with men;
women whose function is explicitly nonreproductive, almost anti-
reproductive; sex animals in heat or pretending, showing themselves for sex, prancing around or posed for sex.
The farming model relates to motherhood, women as a class
planted with the male seed and harvested; women used for the fruit
they bear, like trees; women who run the gamut from prized cows
to mangy dogs, from highbred horses to sad beasts of burden.
These two poles of the female condition are only superficially
and conceptually distinct and opposite. Men say the two are poles
to begin with, distinct and opposite. That male conceit is registered and repeated until it is easier to repeat the concept by rote than to see the reality. But the concept is only accurate (descriptive) from a male point of view—that is, if one accepts the male definitions of both the acts involved and the women involved. In
the course of women’s lives, and therefore from a woman-based
perspective, the two conditions overlap and intersect, each reinforcing the efficacy of the other. Any woman can be both a prostitute and a mother, a prostitute and a wife (a potential mother), or one then the other in either order; and any woman can be subject
to the imperatives of both the brothel and the farming models of
female usage. On a grand scale, more women become mothers,
fewer prostitutes.
In general, the euphemisms of religion and romantic love keep
women from ever recognizing the farming model as having to do
directly and personally with them. Modern women do not think of
themselves as cows, nor as land that the man seeds; but maleheaded marriage incorporates both these vivid traditions of female definition; and the laws have been built on these same images and
ideas of what women are for; and the real history of women has
had as its center the actual use of women as cows and as land. The
w ay women are treated, valued, and used has remarkably little in
common with how women perceive themselves. The legend says
that vampires cannot see themselves in mirrors, but in this case the
vampires’ victims cannot see themselves: what would stare back—
the cow, the land, the uterus, the crop, the plowing, the planting,
the harvest, being put out to pasture, going d ry — would annihilate
the delusion of individuality that keeps most women going. The
laws that made women chattel derived from an analogy between
women and cows that hundreds of centuries of men found apt, and
the sexual slur was apparently a neutral observation infused with
the spleen of the moment— she’s a cow. The idea that the male
plants and the woman is planted in originates in antiquity, and
Marcuse among others has reiterated the idea that woman is the
land in more modern times. The farming model is not discussed as
such, even among feminists. It too clearly reveals the hopeless impersonality, degradation, and futility implicit in women’s subordinate position.
The brothel model is more familiar, partly because the situation
of prostitutes is held up to all women as warning, threat, inevitable
doom and damnation, the hellish punishment of girls gone wrong:
punishment for being women involved in sex without the protection of marriage and the purpose of reproduction; punishment for being bad or rebellious or sexually precocious; punishment for
being female without the cleansing sacraments.
In the brothel model, the woman is acknowledged to be for sex
without reference to reproduction. She will still have babies perhaps, but no one owes her anything: not the father, not the state, not the pimp, not the john, no one. Some women on the Left
accept the male leftist view that this is a giant step for womankind:
that this separation of sex and reproduction is in fact a form of
freedom—freedom from domestic constraint and domestic submission, freedom from an intrinsically totalitarian association of sex with reproduction. They do not recognize that in the brothel
model sex is dissociated from reproduction so that the sex can be
sold, so that sex (not babies) is what is produced, so that an intrinsically totalitarian association is forged between sex and money expressed lucidly in the selling of the woman as a sexual commodity.
In the brothel model, the woman is considered to be sexually free