Pornography: Men Possessing Women, by: Andrea ... - Feminish

leave her alone. The moment we leave her alone she ceases tobe true Woman: where, then, could she go alone to seek andfind her “true Womanhood”? 17This same view was expressed with rawer passion by OttoWeininger in Sex and Character* (1903), an influential book in pre-Hitler Europe that equated women and Jews as worthless, lying,cheating, deceiving. While he has since been surpassed as an anti-Semite by the men whom he influenced, he still holds his own as amisogynist:When man became sexual he formed woman. That woman is atall has happened simply because man has accepted his sexuality.Woman is merely the result of this affirmation; she issexuality itself. Woman’s existence is dependent on man; whenman, as man, in contradistinction to woman, is sexual, he isgiving woman form, calling her into existence. 18The unembodied woman apparently described by Weininger—shedoes not exist until man calls her into existence—is not reallyunembodied, just truncated: “To put it bluntly, man possessessexual organs; her sexual organs possess woman. ” 19To put it morebluntly: she is cunt, formed by men, used by men, her sexualorgans constituting her whole being and her whole value.And what is the value of this sexual object to men, since it is theywho form her, use her, and give her what value she has? Thepioneering male masochist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who spentmost of his life bullying bewildered women into wearing furs andhalfheartedly whipping him, candidly wrote in his diary that “mycruel ideal woman is for me simply the instrument by which Iterrorise myself. ” 20 The nature of the act does not change the natureof the act: the female is the instrument; the male is the center of* Freud considered the book “remarkable” and its author “highly gifted butsexually deranged. ” Cf. Two Case Histories, vol. 10, The Standard Edition ofthe Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, eds. and trans. JamesStrachey and Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1962), p. 36n.