know.
Women used to be identified as a group by what was presumed to be a biological wound - the vaginal slit, the place for penile penetration. There is a 2, 000 year history of the slit’s
defining the person. If a stranger can go from the outside
to the inside, the instrumentality of that action is the whole
purpose of the creature to whom it is done. That area of
the female body has hundreds of dirty names that serve as
synonyms.
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The mystery is why the vagina is such a mystery. Any reference to one of the dirty names elicits sniggers and muted laughs. What are seen as the sexual parts of a woman’s body
are always jokes; anything nonsexual is trivial or trivialized.
For a prostitute, the whole body becomes the sexual part,
as if there were nothing human, only an anatomical use. She
gets to be dirty al over, and what is done to her gets to be
dirty al over. She is also a joke. None of the women I’ve met
in my life has been either dirty or a joke.
Feminists have good reasons for feeling tired. The backlash
against feminism has been deeply stupid. But first there is the
frontlash, the misogyny that saturates the gender system, so
that a woman is always less. The frontlash is the world the
way one knew it thirty-five years ago; there was no feminism
to stand against the enemies of women.
I often see the women’s movement referred to as one of the
most successful social change movements the world has yet
seen, and there is great truth in that. In some parts of the
Western world, fathers do not own their daughters under the
law; the fact that this has transmogrified into a commonplace
incest doesn’t change the accomplishment in rendering the
paterfamilias a nul ity in the old sense.
In most parts of the Western world, rape in marriage is now
il egal - it was not illegal thirty-five years ago.
In the United States, most women have paying jobs, even
though equal pay for equal work is a long way off; and
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although it is stil true that sexual harassment makes women
migrants in the labor market, the harassment itself is now
il egal and one can sue - one has a weapon.
Middle-class women keep battery a secret and in working-
and lower-class families battery is not suf iciently stigmatized;
nevertheless, there are new initiatives against both bat ery
and the batterer, and there wil be more, including the nearly
universal acceptance of a self-defense plea for killing a
bat erer.
The slime of woman hating comes now from the bot om,
oozing its way up the social scale. There is a class beneath
working and lower class that is entirely marginalized. It’s the
sex-for-money class, the whoring class, the pornography class,
the trafficked-woman class, the woman who is invisible almost
because one can see so much of her. Each inch of nakedness is
an inch of worthlessness and lack of social protection. The
world’s economies have taken to trafficking in women; the
woman with a few shekels is bet er off, they say, than the
woman with none. I know a few formerly prostituted women,
including myself, who disagree.
The women I’ve met are very often first raped, then pimped
inside their own families while they are still children. Their
bodies have no borders. Middle-class women, including middle-
class feminists, cannot imagine such marginality. It’s as if the
story is too weird, too ugly, too unsightly for an educated
woman to believe.
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What comes along with every ef ort to stop the sexual
abuse of women is the denial that the sexual abuse is happening at al , and U. S. women should understand that William Jefferson Clinton and his enabler, the senator, have set women
back more than thirty-five years in this regard. Some women
are pushed up and some women are pushed down. It’s the
women who are down who are paying the freight for al the
rest; the women who have been pushed up even a smidge
have taken to acting as if everything is al right or wil be soon.
Their arguments are not with men or even with subgroups of
men, for instance, pimps. They smile and make nice with the
men. Their arguments are with me or other militants. Being a
militant simply requires fighting sexual abuse - the right of a
rapist, the right of a pimp, the right of a john, the right of an
incest-daddy to use or intimidate or coerce girls or women.
A young woman just out of college says that date rape does
not happen, and the media conspire to make her rich and
famous.
A woman of no intellectual distinction writes a 3, 000-page
book, or so it seems, and she is celebrated - she becomes rich
and famous.
The wealthy wife of a multimil ionaire writes longingly
about being a stay-at-home mother. Feminists, she says, have
made that too hard - as she pursues a golden career writing
(without talent) about how she wants to be home mopping
up infant vomit.
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A middle-class English feminist of ferocious mediocrity
spends her time charting the eating disorders of her betters.
They are not so evident on the landscape now, but there
were so-called feminists who published in Playboy, Hustler,
and Penthouse and penned direct attacks on feminists fighting
pornography and prostitution. There were women labeled
feminist who wrote pornographic scenarios in which the
so-called fantasies were the rape of other feminists, usually
named and sometimes drawn but always recognizable; one at
least has become a male through surgery - her head and heart
were always right there.
Making fun of the victims was even more commonplace
than making fun of the feminists fighting in behalf of those
who had been raped or prostituted.
It became an insult to be cal ed or considered a victim, even
when one had been victimized. The women in pornography
and prostitution had not been victimized just once or by a
stranger; more often the family tree was a poison tree - sexual
abuse grew on every branch. Only in the United States could
second-class citizens (women) be proud to disown the experiences of sisters (prostitutes), stand up for the predator, and minimize sexual abuse - this after thirty-five years spent
fighting for the victim’s right to live outside the dynamic of
exploitation. “If you’re ignorant to what’s going on around
you, ” said one former prostitute, "or haven’t got the education
to bring yourself out of that, you stay there. And so it
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becomes from the little go-go dancer to the strip-tease dancer