Occupation/Collaboration
(from Chapter 7 of Intercourse,
1987)
by Andrea Dworkin
Life can be better
for women--economic and political conditions improved-- and at the same time
the status of women can remain resistant, indeed impervious, to change: so
far in history this is precisely the paradigm for social change as it relates
to the condition of women. Reforms are made, important ones; but the status
of women relative to men does not change. Women are still less significant,
have less privacy, less integrity, less self- determination. This means that
women have less freedom. Freedom is not an abstraction, nor is a little of it
enough. A little more of it is not enough either. Having less, being less,
impoverished in freedom and rights, women then inevitably have less
self-respect: less self-respect than men have and less self-respect than any
human being needs to live a brave and honest life. Intercourse as domination
battens on that awful absence of self-respect. It expands to fill the near
vacuum. The uses of women, now, in intercourse-- not the abuses to the extent
that they can be separated out--are absolutely permeated by the reality of
male power over women. We are poorer than men in money and so we have to
barter sex or sell it outright (which is why they keep us poorer in money).
We are poorer than men in psychological well-being because for us self-esteem
depends on the approval--frequently expressed through sexual desire--of those
who have and exercise power over us. Male power may be arrogant or elegant;
it can be churlish or refined: but we exist as persons to the extent that men
in power recognize us. When they need some service or want some sensation,
they recognize us somewhat, with a sliver of consciousness; and when it is
over, we go back to ignominy, anonymous, generic womanhood. Because of their
power over us, they are able to strike our hearts dead with contempt or
condescension. We need their money; intercourse is frequently how we get it.
We need their approval to be able to survive inside our own skins;
intercourse is frequently how we get it. They force us to be compliant, turn
us into parasites, then hate us for not letting go. Intercourse is frequently
how we hold on: fuck me. How to separate the act of intercourse from the
social reality of male power is not clear, especially because it is male power
that constructs both the meaning and the current practice of intercourse as
such. But it is clear that reforms do not change women's status relative to
men, or have not yet. It is clear that reforms do not change the
intractability of women's civil inferiority. Is intercourse itself then a
basis of or a key to women's continuing social and sexual inequality?
Intercourse may not cause women's orgasm or even have much of a correlation
with it--indeed, we rarely find intercourse and orgasm in the same place at
the same time--but intercourse and women's inequality are like Siamese twins,
always in the same place at the same time pissing in the same pot. Women have wanted
intercourse to work and have submitted--with regret or with enthusiasm, real
or faked--even though or even when it does not. The reasons have often been
foul, filled with the spiteful but carefully hidden malice of the powerless.
Women have needed what can be gotten through intercourse: the economic and
psychological survival; access to male power through access to the male who
has it; having some hold--psychological, sexual, or economic--on the ones who
act, who decide, who matter. There has been a deep, consistent, yet of course
muted objection to what Anais Nin has called "[t]he hunter, the rapist,
the one for whom sexuality is a thrust, nothing more."3 Women
have also wanted intercourse to work in this sense: women have wanted
intercourse to be, for women, an experience of equality and passion,
sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of love that includes men as
human too; and women want the human in men, including in the act of
intercourse. Even without the dignity of equal power, women have believed in
the redeeming potential of love. There has been--despite the cruelty of
exploitation and forced sex--a consistent vision for women of a sexuality
based on a harmony that is both sensual and possible. In the words of sex
reformer Ellen Key:
A
stream herself, she would move over the earth, sensual and equal; especially,
she will go her own way. Shere Hite has
suggested an intercourse in which "thrusting would not be considered as
necessary as it now is. . . [There might be] more a mutual lying together in
pleasure, penis-in-vagina, vagina-covering-penis, with female orgasm
providing much of the stimulation necessary for male orgasm."5
These visions of a
humane sensuality based in equality are in the aspirations of women; and even
the nightmare of sexual inferiority does not seem to kill them. They are not
searching analyses into the nature of intercourse; instead they are deep,
humane dreams that repudiate the rapist as the final arbiter of reality. They
are an underground resistance to both inferiority and brutality, visions that
sustain life and further endurance. They also do not
amount to much in real life with real men. There is, instead, the cold
fucking, duty-bound or promiscuous; the romantic obsession in which eventual
abandonment turns the vagina into the wound Freud claimed it was; intimacy
with men who dread women, coital dread--as Kafka wrote in his diary,
"coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together."6
Fear, too, has a
special power to change experience and compromise any possibility of freedom.
A stream does not know fear. A woman does. Especially women know fear of men
and of forced intercourse. Consent in this world of fear is so passive that
the woman consenting could be dead and sometimes is. "Yeah," said
one man who killed a woman so that he could fuck her after she was dead,
"I sexually assaulted her after she was dead. I always see them girls
laid out in the pictures with their eyes closed and I just had to do it. I
dreamed about it for so long that I just had to do it."7 A The role of fear in
destroying the integrity of men is easy to articulate, to understand, hard to
overstate. Men are supposed to conquer fear in order to experience freedom.
Men are humiliated by fear, not only in their masculinity but in their rights
and freedoms. Men are diminished by fear; compromised irrevocably by it
because freedom is diminished by it. "Fear had entered his life,"
novelist Iris Murdoch wrote,
Hemingway,
using harder prose, wrote the same in book after book. But women are supposed
to treasure the little grain of fear--rub up against it-- eroticize it, want
it, get excited by it; and the fear could and does keep millions quiet:
millions of women; being fucked and silent; upright and silent; waiting and
silent; rolled over on and silent; pursued and silent; killed, fucked, and
silent. The silence is taken to be appropriate. The fear is not perceived as
compromising or destroying freedom. The dictators do flourish: fuck and
flourish. Out of fear and
inequality, women hide, use disguises, trying to pass for indigenous peoples
who have a right to be there, even though we cannot pass. Appropriating
Octavio Paz's description of the behavior of Mexicans in Los Angeles--which
he might not like: "they feel ashamed of their origin . . . they act
like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look
because it could strip them and leave them stark naked."10
Women hide, use disguises, because fear has compromised freedom; and when a
woman has intercourse-- not hiding, dropping the disguise--she has no freedom
because her very being has been contaminated by fear: a grain, a tidal wave,
memory or anticipation. The fear is fear of
power and fear of pain: the child looks at the slit with a mirror and wonders
how it can be, how will she be able to stand the pain. The culture
romanticizes the rapist dimension of the first time: he will force his way in
and hurt her. The event itself is supposed to be so distinct, so entirely
unlike any other experience or category of sensation, that there is no
conception that intercourse can be part of sex, including the first time,
instead of sex itself. There is no slow
opening up, no slow, gradual entry; no days and months of sensuality prior to
entry and no nights and hours after entry. Those who learn to eroticize powerlessness
will learn to eroticize the entry itself: the pushing in, the thrusting, the
fact of entry with whatever force or urgency the act requires or the man
enjoys. There is virtually no protest about entry as such from women;
virtually no satire from men. A fairly formidable character in Don DeLillo's White
Noise, the wife, agrees to read pornography to her husband but she has
one condition:
Her
protests make him hard. The stupidity of the "he entered her" motif
makes her laugh, not kindly. She hates it. We are not, of
course, supposed to be lobbies or elevators. Instead, we are supposed to be
wombs, maternal ones; and the men are trying to get back in away from all the
noise and grief of being adult men with power and responsibility. The stakes
for men are high, as Coitus successfully performed is incest, a return to the maternal
womb; and the punishment appropriate to this crime, castration. What happens
to the penis is coronation, followed by decapitation.12 This
is high drama for a prosaic act of commonplace entry. Nothing is at risk for
her, the entered; whereas he commits incest, is crowned king, and has his
thing cut off. She might like to return to the maternal womb too--because
life outside it is not easy for her either--but she has to be it, for
husbands, lovers, adulterous neighbors, as well as her own children, boys
especially. Women rarely dare, as we say, draw a line: certainly not at the
point of entry into our own bodies, sometimes by those we barely know.
Certainly they did not come from there, not originally, not from this womb
belonging to this woman who is being fucked now. And so we have once again
the generic meaning of intercourse--he has to climb back into some womb,
maternal enough; he has to enter it and survive even coronation and
decapitation. She is made for that; and what can it matter to him that in
entering her, he is entering this one, real, unique individual. And what is entry for
her? Entry is the first acceptance in her body that she is generic, not
individual; that she is one of a many that is antagonistic to the individual
interpretation she might have of her own worth, purpose, or intention.
Entered, she accepts her subservience to his psychological purpose if nothing
else; she accepts being confused with his mother and his Aunt Mary and the
little girl with whom he used to play "Doctor." Entered, she finds
herself depersonalized into a function and worth less to him than he is worth
to himself: because he broke through, pushed in, entered. Without him there,
she is supposed to feel empty, though there is no vacuum there, not
physiologically. Entered, she finds herself accused of regicide at the end.
The king dead, the muscles of the vagina contract again, suggesting that this
will never be easy, never be solved. Lovely Freud, of course, having
discovered projection but always missing the point, wrote to Jung: "In
private I have always thought of Adonis as the penis; the woman's joy when
the god she had thought dead rises again is too transparent!"13
Something, indeed, is too transparent; women's joy tends to be opaque. Entered, she has
mostly given something up: to Adonis, the king, the coronation, the
decapitation for which she is then blamed; she has given up a dividing line
between her and him. Entered, she then finds out what it is to be occupied:
and sometimes the appropriate imagery is of evil and war, the great spreading
evil of how soldiers enter and contaminate. In the words of Marguerite Duras,
"evil is there, at the gates, against the skin."14 It
spreads, like war, everywhere: "breaking in everywhere, stealing,
imprisoning, always there, merged and mingled . . . a prey to the
intoxicating passion of occupying that delightful territory, a child's body,
the bodies of those less strong, of conquered peoples."15 She
is describing an older brother she hates here ("I see wartime and the
reign of my elder brother as one"16). She is not describing
her lover, an older man fucking an adolescent girl. But it is from the sex
that she takes the texture of wartime invasion and occupation, the visceral
reality of occupation: evil up against the skin--at the point of entry, just
touching the slit; then it breaks in and at the same time it surrounds
everything, and those with power use the conquered who are weaker, inhabit
them as territory. Physically, the woman
in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally:
occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied
person said yes please, yes hurry, yes more. Having a line at the point of
entry into your body that cannot be crossed is different from not having any
such line; and being occupied in your body is different from not being
occupied in your body. It is human to experience these differences whether or
not one cares to bring the consequences of them into consciousness. Humans,
including women, construct meaning. That means that when something happens to
us, when we have experiences, we try to find in them some reason for them,
some significance that they have to us or for us. Humans find meaning in
poverty and tyranny and the atrocities of history; those who have suffered
most still construct meaning; and those who know nothing take their ignorance
as if it were a precious, rare clay and they too construct meaning. In this
way, humans assert that we have worth; what has happened to us matters; our time
here on earth is not entirely filled with random events and spurious pain. On
the contrary, we can understand some things if we try hard to learn empathy;
we can seek freedom and honor and dignity; that we care about meaning gives
us a human pride that has the fragility of a butterfly and the strength of
tempered steel. The measure of women's oppression is that we do not take
intercourse--entry, penetration, occupation--and ask or say what it means: to
us as a dominated group or to us as a potentially free and self-determining
people. Instead, intercourse is a loyalty test; and we are not supposed to
tell the truth unless it compliments and upholds the dominant male ethos on
sex. We know nothing, of course, about intercourse because we are women and
women know nothing; or because what we know simply has no significance,
entered into as we are. And men know everything--all of them--all the
time--no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are.
Anything men say on intercourse, any attitude they have, is valuable,
knowledgeable, and deep, rooted in the cosmos and the forces of nature as it
were: because they know; because fucking is knowing; because he knew her but
she did not know him; because the God who does not exist framed not only sex
but also knowledge that way. Women do not just lie about orgasm, faking it or
saying it is not important. Women lie about life by not demanding to
understand the meaning of entry, penetration, occupation, having boundaries
crossed over, having lesser privacy: by avoiding the difficult, perhaps
impossible (but how will we ever know?) questions of female freedom. We take
oaths to truth all right, on the holy penis before entry. In so doing, we
give up the most important dimension of what it means to be human: the search
for the meaning of our real experience, including the sheer invention of that
meaning-- called creativity when men do it. If the questions make the holy
penis unhappy, who could survive what the answers might do? Experience is
chosen for us, then, imposed on us, especially in intercourse, and so is
its meaning. We are allowed to have intercourse on the terms men
determine, according to the rules men make. We do not have to have an orgasm;
that terrible burden is on them. We are supposed to comply whether we want to
or not. Want is active, not passive or lethargic. Especially we are
supposed to be loyal to the male meanings of intercourse, which are
elaborate, dramatic, pulling in elements of both myth and tragedy: the king
is dead! long live the king!--and the Emperor wears designer jeans. We have
no freedom and no extravagance in the questions we can ask or the
interpretations we can make. We must be loyal; and on what scale would we be
able to reckon the cost of that? Male sexual discourse on the meaning of
intercourse becomes our language. It is not a second language even though it
is not our native language; it is the only language we speak, however, with
perfect fluency even though it does not say what we mean or what we think we
might know if only we could find the right word and enough privacy in which
to articulate it even just in our own minds. We know only this one language
of these folks who enter and occupy us: they keep telling us that we are
different from them; yet we speak only their language and have none, or none
that we remember, of our own; and we do not dare, it seems, invent one, even
in signs and gestures. Our bodies speak their language. Our minds think in
it. The men are inside us through and through. We hear something, a dim
whisper, barely audible, somewhere at the back of the brain; there is some
other word, and we think, some of us, sometimes, that once it belonged to us. There are
female-supremacist models for intercourse that try to make us the masters of
this language that we speak that is not ours. They evade some fundamental
questions about the act itself and acknowledge others. They have in common a
glorious ambition to see women self-determining, vigorous and free lovers who
are never demeaned or diminished by force or subordination, not in society,
not in sex. The great advocate of the female-first model of intercourse in
the nineteenth century was Victoria Woodhull. She understood that rape was
slavery; not less than slavery in its insult to human integrity and human
dignity. She acknowledged some of the fundamental questions of female freedom
presented by intercourse in her imperious insistence that women had a natural
right--a right that inhered in the nature of intercourse itself--to be
entirely self-determining, the controlling and dominating partner, the one
whose desire determined the event, the one who both initiates and is the
final authority on what the sex is and will be. Her thinking was not
mean-spirited, some silly role reversal to make a moral point; nor was it a
taste for tyranny hidden in what pretended to be a sexual ethic. She simply
understood that women are unspeakably vulnerable in intercourse because of
the nature of the act--entry, penetration, occupation; and she understood
that in a society of male power, women were unspeakably exploited in
intercourse. Society--men--had to agree to let the woman be the mind, the
heart, the lover, the free spirit, the physical vitality behind the act. The
commonplace abuses of forced entry, the devastating consequences of being
powerless and occupied, suggested that the only condition under which women
could experience sexual freedom in intercourse--real choice, real freedom,
real happiness, real pleasure--was in having real and absolute control in
each and every act of intercourse, which would be, each and every time,
chosen by the woman. She would have the incontrovertible authority that would
make intercourse possible: To woman, by nature,
belongs the right of sexual determination. When the instinct is aroused in
her, then and then only should commerce follow. When woman rises from sexual
slavery to sexual freedom, into the ownership and control of her sexual
organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom, then will this instinct
become pure and holy; then will woman be raised from the iniquity and
morbidness in which she now wallows for existence, and the intensity and
glory of her creative functions be increased a hundred-fold . . .17 The consent standard
is revealed as pallid, weak, stupid, second-class, by contrast with
Woodhull's standard: that the woman should have authority and control over
the act. The sexual humiliation of women through male ownership was
understood by Woodhull to be a concrete reality, not a metaphor, not
hyperbole: the man owned the woman's sexual organs. She had to own her sexual
organs for intercourse to mean freedom for her. This is more concrete and
more meaningful than a more contemporary vocabulary of "owning"
one's own desire. Woodhull wanted the woman's desire to be the desire of
significance; but she understood that ownership of the body was not an
abstraction; it was concrete and it came first. The "iniquity and
morbidness" of intercourse under male dominance would end if women could
exercise a materially real self-determination in sex. The woman having
material control of her own sex organs and of each and every act of
intercourse would not lead to a reverse dominance, the man subject to the
woman, because of the nature of the act and the nature of the sex organs involved
in the act: this is the sense in which Woodhull tried to face the fundamental
questions raised by intercourse as an act with consequences, some perhaps
intrinsic. The woman could not forcibly penetrate the man. The woman could
not take him over as he took her over and occupy his body physically inside.
His dominance over her expressed in the physical reality of intercourse had
no real analogue in desire she might express for him in intercourse: she
simply could not do to him what he could do to her. Woodhull's view was
materialist, not psychological; she was the first publisher of the Communist
Manifesto in the Male-dominant gender
hierarchy, however, seems immune to reform by reasoned or visionary argument
or by changes in sexual styles, either personal or social. This may be
because intercourse itself is immune to reform. In it, female is bottom,
stigmatized. Intercourse remains a means or the means of physiologically
making a woman inferior: communicating to her cell by cell her own inferior
status, impressing it on her, burning it into her by shoving it into her,
over and over, pushing and thrusting until she gives up and gives in-- which
is called surrender in the male lexicon. In the experience of
intercourse, she loses the capacity for integrity because her body--the basis
of privacy and freedom in the material world for all human beings--is entered
and occupied; the boundaries of her physical body are--neutrally speaking--
violated. What is taken from her in that act is not recoverable, and she
spends her life--wanting, after all, to have something--pretending that
pleasure is in being reduced through intercourse to insignificance. She will
not have an orgasm--maybe because she has human pride and she resents
captivity; but also she will not or cannot rebel--not enough for it to
matter, to end male dominance over her. She learns to eroticize powerlessness
and self- annihilation. The very boundaries of her own body become
meaningless to her, and even worse, useless to her. The transgression of
those boundaries comes to signify a sexually charged degradation into which
she throws herself, having been told, convinced, that identity, for a female,
is there-- somewhere beyond privacy and self-respect. It is not that there
is no way out if, for instance, one were to establish or believe that
intercourse itself determines women's lower status. New reproductive
technologies have changed and will continue to change the nature of the
world. Intercourse is not necessary to existence anymore. Existence does not
depend on female compliance, nor on the violation of female boundaries, nor
on lesser female privacy, nor on the physical occupation of the female body.
But the hatred of women is a source of sexual pleasure for men in its own
right. Intercourse appears to be the expression of that contempt in pure
form, in the form of a sexed hierarchy; it requires no passion or heart
because it is power without invention articulating the arrogance of those who
do the fucking. Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's
contempt for women; but that contempt can turn gothic and express itself in
many sexual and sadistic practices that eschew intercourse per se. Any
violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth
of pornography. So freedom from intercourse, or a social structure that
reflects the low value of intercourse in women's sexual pleasure, or
intercourse becoming one sex act among many entered into by (hypothetical)
equals as part of other, deeper, longer, perhaps more sensual lovemaking, or
an end to women's inferior status because we need not be forced to reproduce
(forced fucking frequently justified by some implicit biological necessity to
reproduce): none of these are likely social developments because there is a
hatred of women, unexplained, undiagnosed, mostly unacknowledged, that
pervades sexual practice and sexual passion. Reproductive technologies are
strengthening male dominance, invigorating it by providing new ways of
policing women's reproductive capacities, bringing them under stricter male
scrutiny and control; and the experimental development of these technologies
has been sadistic, using human women as if they were sexual laboratory
animals--rats, mice, rabbits, cats, with kinky uteri. For increasing numbers
of men, bondage and torture of the female genitals (that were entered into
and occupied in the good old days) may supplant intercourse as a sexual
practice. The passion for hurting women is a sexual passion; and sexual
hatred of women can be expressed without intercourse. There has always been
a peculiar irrationality to all the biological arguments that supposedly
predetermine the inferior social status of women. Bulls mount cows and
baboons do whatever; but human females do not have estrus or go into heat.
The logical inference is not that we are always available for mounting
but rather that we are never, strictly speaking, "available." Nor
do animals have cultures; nor do they determine in so many things what they
will do and how they will do them and what the meaning of their own behavior
is. They do not decide what their lives will be. Only humans face the often
complicated reality of having potential and having to make choices based on
having potential. We are not driven by instinct, at least not much. We have
possibilities, and we make up meanings as we go along. The meanings we create
or learn do not exist only in our heads, in ineffable ideas. Our meanings
also exist in our bodies--what we are, what we do, what we physically feel,
what we physically know; and there is no personal psychology that is separate
from what the body has learned about life. Yet when we look at the human
condition, including the condition of women, we act as if we are driven by
biology or some metaphysically absolute dogma. We refuse to recognize our
possibilities because we refuse to honor the potential humans have, including
human women, to make choices. Men too make choices. When will they choose not
to despise us? Being female in this
world is having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love
to hate us. One does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in
body type and behavior and values to become an object of male sexual desire,
which requires an abandonment of a wide- ranging capacity for choice.
Objectification may well be the most singly destructive aspect of gender
hierarchy, especially as it exists in relation to intercourse. The surrender
occurs before the act that is supposed to accomplish the surrender takes
place. She has given in; why conquer her? The body is violated before the act
occurs that is commonly taken to be violation. The privacy of the person is
lessened before the privacy of the woman is invaded: she has remade herself
so as to prepare the way for the invasion of privacy that her preparation
makes possible. The significance of the human ceases to exist as the value of
the object increases: an expensive ornament, for instance, she is incapable
of human freedom--taking it, knowing it, wanting it, being it. Being an
object--living in the realm of male objectification--is abject submission, an
abdication of the freedom and integrity of the body, its privacy, its
uniqueness, its worth in and of itself because it is the human body of a
human being. Can intercourse exist without objectification? Would intercourse
be a different phenomenon if it could, if it did? Would it be shorter or
longer, happier or sadder; more complex, richer, denser, with a baroque
beauty or simpler with an austere beauty; or bang bang bang? Would
intercourse without objectification, if it could exist, be compatible with
women's equality--even an expression of it--or would it still be stubbornly
antagonistic to it? Would intercourse cause orgasm in women if women were not
objects for men before and during intercourse? Can intercourse exist without
objectification and can objectification exist without female complicity in
maintaining it as a perceived reality and a material reality too: can
objectification exist without the woman herself turning herself into an
object--becoming through effort and art a thing, less than human, so that he
can be more than human, hard, sovereign, king? Can intercourse exist without
the woman herself turning herself into a thing, which she must do because men
cannot fuck equals and men must fuck: because one price of dominance is that
one is impotent in the face of equality? To become the object,
she takes herself and transforms herself into a thing: all freedoms are
diminished and she is caged, even in the cage docile, sometimes physically
maimed, movement is limited: she physically becomes the thing he wants to
fuck. It is especially in the acceptance of object status that her humanity
is hurt: it is a metaphysical acceptance of lower status in sex and in society;
an implicit acceptance of less freedom, less privacy, less integrity. In
becoming an object so that he can objectify her so that he can fuck her, she
begins a political collaboration with his dominance; and then when he enters
her, he confirms for himself and for her what she is: that she is something,
not someone; certainly not someone equal. There is the initial
complicity, the acts of self-mutilation, self-diminishing,
self-reconstruction, until there is no self, only the diminished, mutilated
reconstruction. It is all superficial and unimportant, except what it costs
the human in her to do it: except for the fact that it is submissive,
conforming, giving up an individuality that would withstand object status or
defy it. Something happens inside; a human forgets freedom; a human learns
obedience; a human, this time a woman, learns how to goose-step the female
way. Wilhelm Reich, that most optimistic of sexual liberationists, the only
male one to abhor rape really, thought that a girl needed not only
"a free genital sexuality" but also "an undisturbed room,
proper contraceptives, a friend who is capable of love, that is, not a
National Socialist . . . "18 All remain hard for women to
attain; but especially the lover who is not a National Socialist. So the act
goes beyond complicity to collaboration; but collaboration requires a
preparing of the ground, an undermining of values and vision and dignity, a
sense of alienation from the worth of other human beings--and this alienation
is fundamental to females who are objectified because they do not experience
themselves as human beings of worth except for their value on the market as
objects. Knowing one's own human value is fundamental to being able to
respect others: females are remade into objects, not human in any sense
related to freedom or justice--and so what can females recognize in other
females that is a human bond toward freedom? Is there anything in us to love
if we do not love each other as the objects we have become? Who can love
someone who is less than human unless love itself is domination per se?
Alienation from human freedom is deep and destructive; it destroys whatever
it is in us as humans that is creative, that causes us to want to find
meaning in experiences, even hard experiences; it destroys in us that which
wants freedom whatever the hardship of attaining it. In women, these great
human capacities and dimensions are destroyed or mutilated; and so we find
ourselves bewildered--who or what are these so-called persons in human form
but even that not quite, not exactly, who cannot remember or manifest the
physical reality of freedom, who do not seem to want or to value the
individual experience of freedom? Being an object for a man means being
alienated from other women--those like her in status, in inferiority, in
sexual function. Collaboration by women with men to keep women civilly and
sexually inferior has been one of the hallmarks of female subordination; we
are ashamed when Freud notices it, but it is true. That collaboration, fully
manifested when a woman values her lover, the National Socialist, above any
woman, anyone of her own kind or class or status, may have simple beginnings:
the first act of complicity that destroys self-respect, the capacity for
self-determination and freedom--readying the body for the fuck instead of for
freedom. The men have an answer: intercourse is freedom. Maybe it is
second-class freedom for second-class humans. What does it mean to
be the person who needs to have this done to her: who needs to be needed as an
object; who needs to be entered; who needs to be occupied; who needs to be
wanted more than she needs integrity or freedom or equality? If
objectification is necessary for intercourse to be possible, what does that
mean for the person who needs to be fucked so that she can experience herself
as female and who needs to be an object so that she can be fucked? The brilliance of
objectification as a strategy of dominance is that it gets the woman to take
the initiative in her own degradation (having less freedom is degrading). The
woman herself takes one kind of responsibility absolutely and thus commits
herself to her own continuing inferiority: she polices her own body; she
internalizes the demands of the dominant class and, in order to be fucked,
she constructs her life around meeting those demands. It is the best system
of colonialization on earth: she takes on the burden, the responsibility, of
her own submission, her own objectification. In some systems in which turning
the female into an object for sex requires actual terrorism and maiming--for
instance, footbinding or removing the clitoris-- the mother does it, having
had it done to her by her mother. What men need done to women so that men can
have intercourse with women is done to women so that men will have
intercourse; no matter what the human cost; and it is a gross indignity to
suggest that when her collaboration is complete-- unselfconscious because
there is no self and no consciousness left--she is free to have freedom in
intercourse. When those who dominate you get you to take the initiative in
your own human destruction, you have lost more than any oppressed people yet
has ever gotten back. Whatever intercourse is, it is not freedom; and if it
cannot exist without objectification, it never will be. Instead occupied
women will be collaborators, more base in their collaboration than other
collaborators have ever been: experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority;
calling intercourse freedom. It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to
convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of
freedom for women: and all the women say it is so. If intercourse can be
an expression of sexual equality, it will have to survive-- on its own merits
as it were, having a potential for human expression not yet recognized or
realized--the destruction of male power over women; and rape and prostitution
will have to be seen as the institutions that most impede any experience of
intercourse as freedom--chosen by full human beings with full human freedom.
Rape and prostitution negate self-determination and choice for women; and
anyone who wants intercourse to be freedom and to mean freedom had better
find a way to get rid of them. Maybe life is tragic and the God who does not
exist made women inferior so that men could fuck us; or maybe we can only
know this much for certain--that when intercourse exists and is experienced
under conditions of force, fear, or inequality, it destroys in women the will
to political freedom; it destroys the love of freedom itself. We become
female: occupied; collaborators against each other, especially against those
among us who resist male domination--the lone, crazy resisters, the organized
resistance. The pleasure of submission does not and cannot change the fact, the
cost, the indignity, of inferiority. Notes 1.
Octavio
Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove
Press, 1961), p. 22. 2.
Shere
Hite, The Hite Report (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1976),
p. 196. 3.
Anais
Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 8. 4.
Ellen
Key, Love and Marriage, trans. Arthur G. Chater (New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons, 1911), p. 82. 5.
Hite,
The Hite Report, p. 141. 6.
Franz
Kafka, Diaries 1910-1913, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (New York:
Schocken Books, 1965), p. 296. 7.
State
v. Hunt, 220 8.
State
v. Hunt, 220 9.
Iris
Murdoch, Henry and Cato (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), p. 262. 10.Paz, Labyrinth, p. 13. 11.Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: The
Viking Press, 1985), p. 29. 12.Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (New York:
Random House, 1966), p.133. 13.Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, The Freud/Jung
Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, ed. William
McGuire, trans. Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1974), p. 265. 14.Marguerite Duras, The Lover, trans.
Barbara Bray (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 63. 15.Duras, The Lover, p. 63. 16.Duras, The Lover, p. 62. 17.Victoria Claflin Woodhull, The Victoria
Woodhull Reader, ed. Madeleine B. Sterm (Weston, Mass.: M&S Press,
1974), p. 40. 18.Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution,
trans. Theodore P. Wolfe, ed. rev. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1970), p. 15. Copyright © 1987 by Andrea
Dworkin. |