On another level, it means that every woman’s fate is tied to the
fate of women whom she politically and morally abhors. For in-
stance, it means that rape jeopardizes communist and fascist
women, liberal, conservative, Democratic, or Republican women,
racist women and black women, Nazi women and Jew ish women,
homophobic women and homosexual women. The crimes committed against women because they are women articulate the condition of women. T he eradication of these crimes, the transformation of the condition of women, is the purpose of feminism: which means that feminism requires a most rigorous definition of
what those crimes are so as to determine what that condition is.
This definition cannot be compromised by a selective representation of the sex class based on sentim entality or wishful thinking.
This definition cannot exclude prudes or sluts or dykes or mothers
or virgins because one does not want to be associated w ith them.
To be a feminist means recognizing that one is associated with all
women not as an act of choice but as a matter of fact. The sex-class
system creates the fact. When that system is broken, there w ill
be no such fact. Feminists do not create this common condition
by making alliances: feminists recognize this common condition
because it exists as an intrinsic part of sex oppression. The fundamental knowledge that women are a class having a common condition— that the fate of one woman is tied substantively to the fate of all women— toughens feminist theory and practice. That fundamental knowledge is an almost unbearable test of seriousness.
There is no real feminism that does not have at its heart the tempering discipline of sex-class consciousness: knowing that women share a common condition as a class, like it or not.
W hat is that common condition? Subordinate to men, sexually
colonized in a sexual system of dominance and submission, denied
rights on the basis of sex, historically chattel, generally considered
biologically inferior, confined to sex and reproduction: this is the
general description of the social environment in which all women
live. But what is the real map of that environment? Which crimes
create the topography? Drawing 1 shows the basic condition of
E CONOMI C
R A P E
EXPLOI TATI ON
P R O S TI TU T I O N
DRAWING 1. THE CONDITION OF WOMEN
women, a lateral view of the female bottom of sex hierarchy. Rape,
battery, economic exploitation, and reproductive exploitation are
the basic crimes committed against women in the sex-class system
in which they are devalued because they are women. The crimes
are points on a circle because it is a closed system , from nowhere to
nowhere. These specific crimes are each committed against huge
percentages of the female population at any given time. Rape, for
instance, consists not only of police-blotter rape but also marital
rape, incestuous abuse of girls, any sex that is coerced. Battery is
estimated to have happened to 50 percent of married women in the
United States alone. All housewives are economically exploited; all
working women are. Reproductive exploitation includes forced
pregnancy and forced sterilization. There are few female lives not
touched by one, two, or three of these crimes and significantly
determined by all of them. At the heart of the female condition is
pornography: it is the ideology that is the source of all the rest; it
truly defines what women are in this system — and how women are
treated issues from what women are. Pornography is not a metaphor for what women are; it is what women are in theory and in practice. Prostitution is the outer w all, sym bolically the mirror reflection of the pornography, metaphorically built out of brick, concrete, stone, to keep women in—in the sex class. Prostitution is the all-encompassing condition, the body trapped in barter, the body
imprisoned as commodity. W ith respect to the circle of crim es—
rape, battery, reproductive exploitation, economic exploitation—
the crimes can be placed anywhere in the circle in any order. T hey
are the crimes of the sex-class system against women; they are the
crimes that keep women women in an immovable system of sex
hierarchy. T hey are crimes committed against women as women.
Economic exploitation is a specific of women’s condition; it is not a
sex-neutral political category into which the experience of women
sometimes falls. Women are segregated in job ghettos as women;
the lower pay of women is systematic; the sale of sex is a funda
mental dimension of economic exploitation, whether in prostitution, marriage, or in the marketplace; when women move in large numbers into high-status jobs (male jobs), the jobs lose status (become female jobs); doing the same or comparable jobs as men, women get paid less. Economic exploitation is a key crime against
women but it is not the same economic exploitation that men experience. The construction of causality among the crimes or even the establishment of sequentiality (in which order the crimes appeared
in history or prehistory) is ultimately irrelevant. It does not matter
whether rape came first and caused the systematic economic degradation of women, or whether economic exploitation created conditions in which the production of children got the value it now has, or whether men batter because of jealousy over women’s reproductive capacity, or whether the etiology of rape is in the superior physical strength of men to women discovered in acts of battery
that later became sanctioned and systematic. One can follow the
circle around in either direction (see drawing 2) and construct marvelous theories of causality or sequentiality, most of which are plausible and interesting; and one can try to prioritize the political
importance of the crimes. But what must matter now is the condition of women now: these crimes are now its features, its characteristic events, its experiential absolutes, its inescapable attacks on women as women. These crimes are real, systematic, and define
the condition of women. The relationships between them do not
matter so much as the fact that they are facts: equal, essential,
basic facts. Seen in this light, prohibition against lesbianism, for
instance, is not the same kind of equal, essential, basic fact, nor is
lesbianism an obvious or sure road to freedom. Lesbianism is a
transgression of rules, an affront; but its prohibition is not a basic
constituent part of sex oppression and its expression does not substantively breach or transform sex oppression. There is no state of being or act of w ill, including lesbianism, that changes the circle: