there is no state of being or act of will that protects a woman from
D R A WI NG 2. THE C I R C L E OF
C R I M E S A G A I N S T WOME N
the basic crimes against women as women or puts any woman outside the possibility of suffering these crimes. Great wealth does not put a woman outside the circle of crimes; neither does racial supremacy in a racist social system or a good job or a terrific heterosexual relationship with a wonderful man or the most liberated (by any standard) sex life or living with women in a commune in a
pasture. The circle of crimes is also not changed by how one feels
about it. One can decide to ignore it or one can decide it does not
apply for any number of reasons, emotional, intellectual, or practicaclass="underline" nevertheless it is there and it applies.
Going back to the whole model—the circle, the pornography at
the center of it, the all-encompassing wall of prostitution that circumscribes it—it does not matter whether prostitution is perceived as the surface condition, with pornography hidden in the deepest
recesses of the psyche; or whether pornography is perceived as the
surface condition, with prostitution being its wider, more important, hidden base, the largely unacknowledged sexual-economic necessity of women. (See drawings 3 and 4. ) Each has to be understood as intrinsically part of the condition of women—pornography being what women are, prostitution being what women do, the circle of crimes being what women are for. Rape, battery, economic exploitation, and reproductive exploitation require pornography as female metaphysics so as to be virtually self-justifying, virtually invisible abuses; and they also require the wall of prostitution confining women (meaning that whatever women do is within the bounds of prostitution) so that women are always and absolutely accessible. The heart of pornography and the wall of prostitution mirror each other in that both are meant to mean—and concretely do mean in the male system—that women deserve the
crimes that define their condition, that those crimes are responses
to what women are and what women do, that the crimes committed against women define the condition of women correctly— in accordance with what women are and what women do.
T he meaning of this description of what women’s subordination
is, how women are kept subordinate, how that subordination is
acted out on women system atically, is simple for feminists: breaking the circle up, breaking down the w all, annihilating the system ’s heart, are what we must do. The meaning for antifeminists is also
simple: whatever strengthens or vitalizes any aspect of the model is
of great practical value in keeping women subordinate. Antifeminists can disagree strategically (for instance, on whether pornography should be public or private) without disagreeing in principle on what is necessary to keep women encapsulated in subjection (the
use of pornography, its cultural and psychic centrality whether it is
public or private, the use of women as pornography in public and
in private). But one cannot be a feminist and support any element
in this modeclass="underline" there are no exceptions— not civil liberties lawyers
or liberals or sym pathetic men or so-called feminists who indulge
in using the label but evading the substance. Antifeminist politics
come in many guises, but a vivid memory of what the condition of
women is— w hat crimes articulate it, what is at its heart, what is
the impenetrable boundary beyond which women do not pass—
provides a standard for discerning antifeminism in any political
stance. No one can defend or give aid and comfort to that which
keeps women subordinate and at the same time claim to be acting
in behalf of women’s liberation: feminism is not a lifestyle or an
attitude or a feeling of vague sym pathy with women or an assertion
of modernity. Antifeminism saturates the political spectrum from
Right to Left, liberal to conservative, reactionary to progressive.
Antifeminism is resistance to the liberation of women from the sex-
class system , that resistance expressed in constructing political defenses of the constituent parts of sex oppression. This antifeminism is a vital part of programs, values, ideologies, philosophies, arguments, actions, economic, sexual, and social manipulations that are the substance of most political discourse and organizing. Antifeminism is a potent expression of reaction, backlash, and suppression;
DRAWING 3. PROSTITUTION AS
THE MATERIAL REALITY;
PORNOGRAPHY AS
THE UNDERLYING IDEOLOGY
THE C I R C L E OF C R I M E S A G A I N S T WO M E N
P R O S T I T U T I O N
DRAWING 4. PORNOGRAPHY AS
THE SURFACE PHENOMENON:
PROSTITUTION AS
THE UNDERLYING SYSTEM
it is protean; it is easy, popular, and always fashionable in one
form or another.
Antifeminism is also operating whenever any political group is
ready to sacrifice one group of women, one faction, some women,
some kinds of women, to any element of sex-class oppression: to
pornography, to rape, to battery, to economic exploitation, to reproductive exploitation, to prostitution. There are women all along the male-defined political spectrum, including on both extreme
ends of it, ready to sacrifice some women, usually not themselves,
to the brothels or to the farms. The sacrifice is profoundly antifeminist; it is also profoundly immoral. Men mostly accept the disposition of women under the sex-class system and they mostly accept the crimes committed against women: but sometimes the
status of women is addressed, those crimes are addressed, in political discourse. Whenever some women are doctrinally delivered to sex exploitation, the political stance is corrupt. Virtually all ideologies are implicitly antifeminist in that women are sacrificed to higher goals: the higher goal of reproduction; the higher goal of
pleasure; the higher goal of a freedom antipathetic to the freedom
of women; the higher goal of better conditions for workers not
women; the higher goal of a new order that keeps the sex exploitation of women essentially intact; the higher goal of an old order that considers the sex exploitation of women a sign of social stability (woman’s in her place, all’s right with the world). Some women are sacrificed to a function—fucking, reproducing, house-cleaning, and so on. A political promise is made, and kept, that