emmanuel reynaud holy virility the social construction of masculinity

certain women to participate in orgies.' [3] Women then were so
little a part of the 'humanity' of the Ukraine libertarians that
Voline considered raping them as a mere 'shortcoming', and a
secondary one at that, less serious than Makhno's 'great fault'
whigh he considered to be 'alcohol abuse'.
During the Civil War, Spanish women also found there were
limitations to men's success in the fight against hierarchy. The
anarchist, Lucia Sanchez Saornil saw, for example: 'a number of
homes, not only those of CNT members but true anarchists (!?)
ruled according to the purest feudal principles', [4] and she had
to persist in trying to make her 'comrades' notably in the FAI
and the CNT, understand that 'woman... also belongs to the
human species'. She confronted one of them with the following
evidence:
[108 / Holy virility]
«You, can you imagine a bourgeois saying that the workers
should be emancipated? So, if you find it logical that, like
the bourgeois with the worker, the anarchist as a man
keeps woman chained up, it is absurd to hear him shout
'women must be emancipated'. And if he does shout it, how
can one not say to him 'you start'.» [5]
During the struggles they have waged against the power of their
masters, male slaves have rarely questioned their own status as
masters in the relations between the sex classes. Men who call
themselves revolutionaries have, in most cases, perpetuated in
their behaviour and their writings, the appropriation of women.
Besides, some still like to forge concepts such as 'main front'
and 'secondary front', while their wives cook, wash up and
guarantee them a hero's welcome. As for the fate reserved for
the women ―wives and daughters― of the defeated rulers, it is
generally hardly any different from that of their other material
possessions: if they are unfortunate enough not to have been
able to escape, in most cases they are raped while the house is
plundered. Eldridge Cleaver went so far as to describe rape as
an ''insurrectionary act''. [6] On the whole, men have tried to
make the revolution a matter between themselves, in which
women stayed in the position they were traditionally granted
inside patriarchal organisation. Thus they attempted to restrict
women's participation in the struggle, and subsequently did
their best to keep quiet about the part women nevertheless
played by sanctifying sometimes one ―Red or Black Virgin― to
conceal, behind her glorious image, the reality of the battle of all
the others. During the Paris Commune, for instance, women
played a fundamental role from the beginning of the uprising,
because of their very condition of appropriation. Indeed, on 18
March 1871, when General Lecomte and his men had already
begun to bring down the famous cannons from the Butte, the
women of Monmartre quickly thronged the streets for, as
always, they had risen very early to fetch the milk. They were
then joined by the men whom they had roused, but women were
still, according to all accounts, more numerous in the crowd.
And the events which followed give a fairly good idea of the