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

or scrutiny, that there is an equation between what one wants andthe fact that one is. Going Descartes one better, this convictionmight be expressed: I want and I am entitled to have, therefore IamṠelf is incrementally expanded as the parasite drains self fromthose not entitled to it. To him it is given, by faith and action, frombirth. To her it is denied, by faith and action, from birth. His isnever big enough; hers is always too big, however small. As a child,the first self he drains is that of his mother—whatever she has of it isreserved for him. He feeds off her labor and her qualities. He usesthem up. She is devoted, more or less; but the more is as muchinsult as the less; and nothing is ever enough unless it has been toomuch; all of this regardless of what or how much it has actuallybeen. As the boy matures, he is encouraged to make the treacherousand apparently devastating ‘‘normal adjustment, ” that is, to transferhis parasitism of the mother to other females, who have moresucculent selves to which they are not entitled. In the course of hislife, he reenacts this grand transition as often as he wishes. He findsthe qualities and services he needs and he takes them. Especially heuses women, as Virginia Woolf described in A Room of One's Own, toenlarge himself. He is always in a panic, never large enough. Butstill, his self is immutable however much he may fear its ebbingaway, because he keeps taking, and it is taking that is his immutableright and his immutable self. Even when he is obsessed with hisneed to be more and to have more, he is convinced of his right to beand to have.Second, power is physical strength used over and against othersless strong or without the sanction to use strength as power. Ifphysical strength is not used over and against others— for instance,if a slave is strong—it is not power. The right to physical strengthas power, in a male-supremacist system, is vouchsafed to men. Thesecond tenet of male supremacy is that men are physically strongerthan women and, for that reason, have dominion over them.Physical strength in women that is not directly harnessed to“women’s work” becomes an abomination, and its use against men,that is, as power, is anathema, forbidden, horribly punished. The