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

of female self leads to the inevitable decline of society; and when theabominable She calls attention to herself as human, not object, sheviolates the male’s most essential sense of masculine self. Everyattempt she makes to reclaim the humanity he has stolen from hermakes her subject to insult, ridicule, and abuse. In his view, she isnot a woman unless she acts like a woman as he has defined woman.His definition need not be coherent. It is never scrutinized for logicor consistency or even threadbare common sense. He can theorize,fantasize, call it science or art; whatever he says about women istrue because he says it. He is the authority on what she is becausehe has made her, cut away at her as if she were a piece of stone untilthe prized inanimate object is extracted. As filmmaker AgnesVarda, crediting Simone de Beauvoir as the source, expressed it inher film One Sings, the Other Doesn't: Women are made, not born.Men want women to be objects, controllable as objects arecontrollable. Women who deviate from the male definition aremonstrous, sluts, depraved. Since all women do deviate to somedegree, all women are viewed to some degree as monstrous, sluts,depraved, with appetites that, if unleashed, would swallow up themale, destroy him. Men know that the object does breathe, butrather than face up to the meaning of this knowledge, they prefer tobelieve that under the object lurks a hungry, angry viper; that theobject is a rock that must never be moved or picked up or the viperwill strike. Suddenly, one is confronted with the fragile, vulnerablemale, threatened by reptilian female genitalia (for instance, thevagina dentata), or the devouring mother, or the insatiable lust ofthe nymphomaniac. T he fear that what men have suppressed inwomen will emerge to destroy them makes the control of women anurgent and absolute necessity. Men dare to claim not only that theyare fragile but that the power of women over them is immense andreal.In The Mermaid and the Minotaur, Dorothy Dinnerstein proposesthat this delusion originates in the infantile experience of the allpowerfulmother; all infantile ambivalences and rage are taken outon women for the duration of a male life. (According to Dinnerstein,women are self-punishing because of this same infantile rage. )