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

W ith both the male and the female, “love, ” or sexualattraction, is originally and preeminently “sadic”; it ispositively gratified by the infliction of pain; it is as cruel ashunger. T hat is the direct, fundamental, and longest establishedsentiment connected with the sexual impulse. T hemale animal captures, mauls and bites the female, who inturn uses her teeth and claws freely, and the “lovers” issuefrom the sexual combat bleeding and mangled. Crustaceansusually lose a limb or two in the encounter. All mammalswithout exception use their teeth on these occasions. Pallasdescribes the mating of camels: as soon as impregnation hastaken place, the female, with a vicious snarl, turns round andattacks the male with her teeth, and the latter is driven awayin terror. 2T he equality of sadism here is patently false: the male animaldoes the capturing; the poor female camel is a bit late interrorizing the male—she is already pregnant and barefoot, as itwere. But a basis is clearly established for fearing the sexualsadism of the female. T he hit-and-run sexuality of the humanmale seems, in this context, a reasonable attem pt to save life andlimb from the sadistic treachery of the female. O f course, itwould make more sense if he were attem pting to fuck a camel.The more contemporary advocates of crawling, swimming, andflying things as illuminators of human sexual and social behaviortake an unambiguous stand in favor of the male as the consummatebiological sadist: naturally, they pick bugs, fish, and fowl appropriateto their point of view. Essentially, they maintain that thewomen’s movement is biologically deviant: if women were capableof taking power (taking power seen exclusively as a function ofinherent sexual sadism), then perhaps women might even becapable of using and maintaining power. Since this idea isrepugnant, the strategy of this particular male-supremacist clique isto assert that it is a biological impossibility for females to use sexualforce, that is, to be sexually controlling or dominant. In SexualPolitics, Kate Millett gave a representative example of this way ofthinking. She described the so-called cichlid effect, “. . . a theoryof human sexuality modeled on the reactions of a prehistoric fish