shit all over him. He is, o f course, ecstatic:
Gee did I smell o f come and teenage sweat and urine
and I had two more toss-offs myself thinking about
their tough young faces and dicks enjoying me for
hot kicks. 15
T h e stereotype o f the homosexual which emerges
from the general run o f Suck fiction is not very different
from the stereotype o f woman. T h e homosexual is
queer, asshole, cocksucker, faggot; the woman is hole,
hot wet fuck tube, hot slit, or just plain ass. He thrives
on pain and so does she. Gangbanging is their mutual
joy. Huge, throbbing, monster, atom-smashing cock is
god and master to them both. T h e parts they play in the
sadomasochistic script are the same: so are costumes,
attitudes, and other conventional cultural baggage. It
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is not hard to see that the struggle for gay male liberation and women’s liberation is a common struggle: both mean freedom from the stigma of being female.
The fantasies (indicative of structural mental sets) which
oppress male homosexuals and women are very much
alike. Women and male homosexuals are united in
their queerness, a union which is real and verifiable —
affirmed by Suck, which contributes to the cultural
oppression of both.
The pages of Suck have, sadly, nothing to do with
sexual liberation — there is no “counter” to the culture to be found anywhere in them. They are, instead, a catalogue of exactly those sexist fantasies which
express our most morbid psychic sets. They chart the
landscape of repression, a landscape that is surprisingly
familiar. As women, we find that we are where we have
always been: the necessary victim, there we are, the
victim again; the eternal object, there we are, the object again. Through the projection of archetypal sadomasochistic images, which are the staple of the sexist mentality, we become more a prisoner, robbed and
cheated of any real experience or authentic communication, thrown back into the intricate confusion of being women in search of a usable identity.
Part Three
THE HERSTORY
We are a feelingless people. If we could
really feel, the pain would be so great that
we would stop all the suffering. If we could
feel that one person every six seconds dies
of starvation (and as this is happening, this
writing, this reading, someone is dying of
starvation) we would stop it. If we could
really feel it in the bowels, the groin, in
the throat, in the breast, we would go into
the streets and stop the war, stop slavery,
stop the prisons, stop the killings, stop
destruction. Ah, I might learn what love is.
When we feel, we will feel the emergency: when we feel the emergency, we
will act: when we act, we will change the
world.
Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre
T he rapes, tortures, and violations o f O, Claire, Anne,
Suck's Helen, et al., are fiction, documenting the twisted
landscape o f male wish-fulfillment. Here we have her-
story, the underbelly o f history, two acts o f gynocide
committed against women by men, their scope and substance largely ignored. One is not surprised to find that they document that same twisted landscape.
I isolate in particular Chinese footbinding and the
persecution o f the witches because they are crimes
which equal in sheer horror and sadism the extermination o f Native Americans and Hitler’s massacre o f the Jews. Those two horrendous slaughters have found a
place, however tenuous, in the “conscience” o f “man. ”
Acts o f genocide against women have barely been noticed, and they have never evoked rage, or horror, or sorrow. That sexist hatred equals racist hatred in its
intensity, irrationality, and contempt for the sanctity
o f human life these two examples clearly demonstrate.
That women have not been exterminated, and will not
be (at least until the technology o f creating life in the
laboratory is perfected) can be attributed to our presumed ability to bear children and, more importantly 93
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Woman Hating
no doubt, to the relative truth that men prefer to fuck
cunts who are nominally alive. I except here necrophili-
acs, those pure and unsullied princes, whose story begins where ours ends.
In addition, in any war, in any violence between
tribes or nations, a specific war crime is perpetrated
against women —that of rape. Every woman raped
during a political nation-state war is the victim of a
much larger war, planetary in its dimensions —the war,
more declared than we can bear to know, that men wage
against women. That war had its most gruesome, grotesque expression when Chinese men bound the feet of Chinese women and when British, Welsh, Irish,
Scottish, German, Dutch, French, Swiss, Italian, Spanish,
and Amerikan men had women burned at the stake in
the name of God the Father and His only Son.
F O O T B I N D I N G E V E N T
Instructions Before Reading Chapter
1. Find a piece o f cloth 10 feet long and 2 inches wide
2. Find a pair o f children’s shoes
3. Bend all toes except the big one under and into the
sole o f the foot. W rap the cloth around these toes
and then around the heel. Bring the heel and toes as
close together as possible. W rap the full length o f
the cloth as tightly as possible
4. Squeeze foot into children’s shoes
5. Walk
6. Imagine that you are 5 years old
7. Imagine being like this for the rest o f your life
C H A P T E R 6
Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding
T he origins o f Chinese footbinding, as o f Chinese
thought in general, belong to that amorphous entity
called antiquity. The 10th century marks the beginning o f the physical, intellectual, and spiritual dehumanization o f women in China through the institution o f footbinding. That institution itself, the implicit belief
in its necessity and beauty, and the rigor with which it
was practiced lasted another 10 centuries. T here were
sporadic attempts at emancipating the foot —some
artists, intellectuals, and women in positions o f power
were the proverbial drop in the bucket. Those attempts,
modest though they were, were doomed to failure:
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