Women Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, by: Andrea ... - Feminish

PLUMEPublished by the Penguin GroupPenguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street,New York, New York 10014, U. S. A.Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, EnglandPenguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, AustraliaPenguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada,M4V 3B2Penguin Books (N. Z. ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New ZealandPenguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, EnglandPublished by Plume, an imprint of New American Library, a division ofPenguin Books USA Inc.10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3Copyright © 1974 by Andrea DworkinAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of AmericaDrawing on page 98 by Jean HolabirdWithout limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of thispublication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, ortransmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both thecopyright owner and the above publisher of this book.BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTSOR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION,PENGUIN BOOKS USA INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK IOOI4.Permissions are on page 218

For Grace Paleyand in Memory of Emma Goldman. . . Shakespeare had a sister; but do notlook for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of thepoet. She died young —alas, she neverwrote a word.. . . Now my belief is thatthis poet who never wrote a word and wasburied at the crossroads still lives. She livesin you and in me, and in many other womenwho are not here tonight, for they arewashing up the dishes and putting thechildren to bed. But she lives; for greatpoets do not die; they are continuing presences;they need only the opportunity towalk among us in the flesh. This opportunity,as I think, it is now coming withinyour power to give her. For my belief isthat if we live another century or so—Iam talking of the common life which is thereal life and not of the little separate liveswhich we live as individuals —and havefive hundred a year each of us and roomsof our own; if we have the habit of freedomand the courage to write exactly whatwe think; if we escape a little from thecommon sitting-room and see human beingsnot always in their relation to eachother but in relation to reality. . . if weface the fact, for it is a fact, that there isno arm to cling to, but that we go alone andthat our relation is to the world of reality. . . then the opportunity will come and thedead poet who was Shakespeare’s sisterwill put on the body which she has so often

laid down. Drawing her life from the livesof the unknown who were her forerunners,as her brother did before her, shewill be born. As for her coming withoutthat preparation, without that effort onour part, without that determination thatwhen she is born again she shall find it possibleto live and write her poetry, that wecannot expect, for that would be impossible.But I maintain that she would comeif we worked for her, and that so to work,even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile.Virginia Woolf,A Room of One's Own (1929)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTRicki Abrams and I began writing this book together inAmsterdam, Holland, in December 1971. We workedlong and hard and through a lot o f living and then, formany reasons, our paths separated. Ricki went to Australia,then to India. I returned to Amerika. So thebook, in its early pieces and fragments, became mine asthe responsibility for finishing it became mine. I thankRicki here for the work we did together, and the timewe had together, and this book which came from thattime and grew beyond it.Andrea Dworkin

CONTENTSIntroduction 17Part One: THE FAIRY TALES 29Chapter 1 Onceuponatime: The Roles 34Chapter 2 Onceuponatime: The Moral of theStory 47Part Two: THE PORNOGRAPHY 5 1Chapter 3 Woman as Victim: Story of O 55Chapter 4 Woman as Victim: The Image 64Chapter 5 Woman as Victim: Suck 75Part Three: THE HERSTORY 91Chapter 6 Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding 95Chapter 7 Gynocide: The Witches 118Part Four: ANDROGYNY 151Chapter 8 Androgyny: The Mythological Model 155Chapter 9 Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, andCommunity 174Afterword 197Notes 205Bibliography 211

There is a misery of the body and a miseryof the mind, and if the stars, whenever welooked at them, poured nectar into ourmouths, and the grass became bread, wewould still be sad. We live in a system thatmanufactures sorrow, spilling it out of itsmill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm,and we drown down, dead, too soon.. . . uprising is the reversal of the system,and revolution is the turning of tides.Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

The Revolution is not an event that takestwo or three days, in which there is shootingand hanging. It is a long drawn outprocess in which new people are created,capable of renovating society so that therevolution does not replace one elite withanother, but so that the revolution createsa new anti-authoritarian structure withanti-authoritarian people who in theirturn re-organize the society so that itbecomes a non-alienated human society,free from war, hunger, and exploitation.Rudi DutschkeMarch 7, 1968

You do not teach someone to count onlyup to eight. You do not say nine and tenand beyond do not exist. You give peopleeverything or they are not able to count atall. There is a real revolution or none atall.Pericles Korovessis, in an interviewin Liberation, June 1973

INTRODUCTIONThis book is an action, a political action where revolutionis the goal. It has no other purpose. It is notcerebral wisdom, or academic horseshit, or ideas carvedin granite or destined for immortality. It is part o f aprocess and its context is change. It is part o f a planetarymovement to restructure community forms andhuman consciousness so that people have power overtheir own lives, participate fully in community, live indignity and freedom.The commitment to ending male dominance as thefundamental psychological, political, and cultural realityo f earth-lived life is the fundamental revolutionarycommitment. It is a commitment to transformation ofthe self and transformation of the social reality on everylevel. The core o f this book is an analysis o f sexism (thatsystem o f male dominance), what it is, how it operateson us and in us. However, I do want to discuss brieflytwo problems, tangential to that analysis, but still crucialto the development of revolutionary program and consciousness.The first is the nature o f the women’s movementas such, and the second has to do with the work ofthe writer.17

10 Woman HatingUntil the appearance of the brilliant anthologySisterhood Is Powerful and Kate Millett’s extraordinarybook Sexual Politics, women did not think of themselvesas oppressed people. Most women, it must be admitted,still do not. But the women’s movement as a radicalliberation movement in Amerika can be dated from theappearance of those two books. We learn as we reclaimour herstory that there was a feminist movement whichorganized around the attainment of the vote forwomen. We learn that those feminists were also ardentabolitionists. Women “came out” as abolitionists —outof the closets, kitchens, and bedrooms; into publicmeetings, newspapers, and the streets. Two activistheroes of the abolitionist movement were Black women,Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, and they standas prototypal revolutionary models.Those early Amerikan feminists thought that suffragewas the key to participation in Amerikan democracyand that, free and enfranchised, the former slaveswould in fact be free and enfranchised. Those womendid not imagine that the vote would be effectively deniedBlacks through literacy tests, property qualifications,and vigilante police action by white racists. Nordid they imagine the “separate but equal” doctrine andthe uses to which it would be put.Feminism and the struggle for Black liberation wereparts of a compelling whole. That whole was called,ingenuously perhaps, the struggle for human rights.The fact is that consciousness, once experienced, cannotbe denied. Once women experienced themselves as activistsand began to understand the reality and meaningof oppression, they began to articulate a politically

Introduction 19conscious feminism. Their focus, their concrete objective,was to attain suffrage for women.T he women’s movement formalized itself in 1848 atSeneca Falls when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and LucretiaMott, both activist abolitionists, called a convention.That convention drafted The Seneca Falls Declaration ofRights and Sentiments which is to this day an outstandingfeminist declaration.In struggling for the vote, women developed manyo f the tactics which were used, almost a century later,in the Civil Rights Movement. In order to change laws,women had to violate them. In order to change convention,women had to violate it. The feminists (suffragettes)were militant political activists who used thetactics o f civil disobedience to achieve their goals.The struggle for the vote began officially with theSeneca Falls Convention in 1848. It was not untilAugust 26, 1920, that women were given the vote by thekindly male electorate. Women did not imagine that thevote would scarcely touch on, let alone transform, theirown oppressive situations. Nor did they imagine thatthe “separate but equal” doctrine would develop asa tool o f male dominance. Nor did they imagine theuses to which it would be put.There have also been, always, individual feminists —women who violated the strictures o f the female role,who challenged male supremacy, who fought for theright to work, or sexual freedom, or release from thebondage o f the marriage contract. Those individualswere often eloquent when they spoke o f the oppressionthey suffered as women in their own lives, but otherwomen, properly trained to their roles, did not listen.

20 Woman HalingFeminists, most often as individuals but sometimes insmall militant groups, fought the system which oppressedthem, analyzed it, were jailed, were ostracized,but there was no general recognition among womenthat they were oppressed.In the last 5 or 6 years, that recognition has becomemore widespread among women. We have begun to understandthe extraordinary violence that has been doneto us, that is being done to us: how our minds areaborted in their development by sexist education; howour bodies are violated by oppressive grooming imperatives;how the police function against us in casesof rape and assault; how the media, schools, andchurches conspire to deny us dignity and freedom; howthe nuclear family and ritualized sexual behavior imprisonus in roles and forms which are degrading to us.We developed consciousness-raising sessions to try tofathom the extraordinary extent of our despair, to tryto search out the depth and boundaries of our internalizedanger, to try to find strategies for freeing ourselvesfrom oppressive relationships, from masochismand passivity, from our own lack of self-respect. Therewas both pain and ecstasy in this process. Womendiscovered each other, for truly no oppressed grouphad ever been so divided and conquered. Women beganto deal with concrete oppressions: to become partof the economic process, to erase discriminatory laws,to gain control over our own lives and over our ownbodies, to develop the concrete ability to survive on ourown terms. Women also began to articulate structuralanalyses of sexist society — Millett did that with SexualPolitics; in Vaginal Politics Ellen Frankfort demonstrated

Introduction 21the complex and deadly antiwoman biases o f the medicalestablishment; in Women and Madness Dr. PhyllisChesler showed that mental institutions are prisons forwomen who rebel against society’s well-defined femalerole.We began to see ourselves clearly, and what we sawwas dreadful. We saw that we were, as Yoko Ono wrote,the niggers o f the world, slaves to the slave. We sawthat we were the ultimate house niggers, ass-licking,bowing, scraping, shuffling fools. We recognized all o four social behavior as learned behavior that functionedfor survival in a sexist world: we painted ourselves,smiled, exposed legs and ass, had children, kepthouse, as our accommodations to the reality of powerpolitics.Most o f the women involved in articulating the oppressiono f women were white and middle class. Wespent, even if we did not earn or control, enormoussums of money. Because o f our participation in the middle-classlifestyle we were the oppressors o f otherpeople, our poor white sisters, our Black sisters, ourChicana sisters —and the men who in turn oppressedthem. This closely interwoven fabric o f oppression,which is the racist class structure o f Amerika today,assured that wherever one stood, it was with at least onefoot heavy on the belly o f another human being.As white, middle-class women, we lived in the houseof the oppressor-of-us-all who supported us as heabused us, dressed us as he exploited us, “treasured”us in payment for the many functions we performed.We were the best-fed, best-kept, best-dressed, mostwilling concubines the world has ever known. We had

22 Woman Hatingno dignity and no real freedom, but we did have goodhealth and long lives.The women’s movement has not dealt with thisbread-and-butter issue, and that is its most awfulfailure. There has been little recognition that the destructionof the middle-class lifestyle is crucial to thedevelopment of decent community forms in which allpeople can be free and have dignity. There is certainlyno program to deal with the realities of the class systemin Amerika. On the contrary, most of the women’smovement has, with appalling blindness, refused to takethat kind of responsibility. Only the day-care movementhas in any way reflected, or acted pragmatically on, theconcrete needs of all classes of women. The anger atthe Nixon administration for cutting day-care funds isnaive at best. Given the structure of power politics andcapital in Amerika, it is ridiculous to expect the federalgovernment to act in the interests of the people. Themoney available to middle-class women who identifyas feminists must be channeled into the programs wewant to develop, and we must develop them. In general,middle-class women have absolutely refused to take anyaction, make any commitment which would interferewith, threaten, or significantly alter a lifestyle, a livingstandard, which is moneyed and privileged.The analysis of sexism in this book articulatesclearly what the oppression of women is, how it functions,how it is rooted in psyche and culture. But thatanalysis is useless unless it is tied to a political consciousnessand commitment which will totally redefinecommunity. One cannot be free, never, not ever, in anunfree world, and in the course of redefining family,

Introduction 23church, power relations, all the institutions which inhabitand order our lives, there is no way to hold ontoprivilege and comfort. T o attempt to do so is destructive,criminal, and intolerable.T he nature o f women’s oppression is unique: womenare oppressed as women, regardless o f class or race;some women have access to significant wealth, but thatwealth does not signify power; women are to be foundeverywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory;women live with those who oppress them, sleepwith them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelesslyit seems, in the gut o f the machinery and way o flife which is ruinous to us. And perhaps most importantly,most women have little sense o f dignity or selfrespector strength, since those qualities are directlyrelated to a sense o f manhood. In Revolutionary Suicide,Huey P. Newton tells us that the Black Panthers did notuse guns because they were symbols o f manhood, butfound the courage to act as they did because they weremen. When we women find the courage to defend ourselves,to take a stand against brutality and abuse, weare violating every notion o f womanhood we have everbeen taught. T he way to freedom for women is boundto be torturous for that reason alone.The analysis in this book applies to the life situationso f all women, but all women are not necessarilyin a state o f primary emergency as women. What I meanby this is simple. As a Jew in Nazi Germany, I would beoppressed as a woman, but hunted, slaughtered, as aJew. As a Native American, I would be oppressed asa squaw, but hunted, slaughtered, as a Native American.That first identity, the one which brings with it as

24 Woman Hatingpart of its definition death, is the identity of primaryemergency. This is an important recognition because itrelieves us of a serious confusion. The fact, for instance,that many Black women (by no means all) experienceprimary emergency as Blacks in no way lessens the responsibilityof the Black community to assimilate thisand other analyses of sexism and to apply it in their ownrevolutionary work.As a writer with a revolutionary commitment, I amparticularly pained by the kinds of books writers arewriting, and the reasons why. I want writers to writebooks because they are committed to the content ofthose books. I want writers to write books as actions. Iwant writers to write books that can make a differencein how, and even why, people live. I want writers towrite books that are worth being jailed for, worthfighting for, and should it come to that in this country,worth dying for.Books are for the most part in Amerika commercialventures. People write them to make money, to becomefamous, to build or augment other careers. Most Amerikansdo not read books—they prefer television. Academicslock books in a tangled web of mindfuck andabstraction. The notion is that there are ideas, then art,then somewhere else, unrelated, life. The notion is thatto have a decent or moral idea is to be a decent or moralperson. Because of this strange schizophrenia, booksand the writing of them have become embroidery on adying way of life. Because there is contempt for theprocess of writing, for writing as a way of discoveringmeaning and truth, and for reading as a piece of thatsame process, we destroy with regularity the few serious

Introduction 25writers we have. We turn them into comic-book figures,bleed them o f all privacy and courage and commonsense, exorcise their vision from them as sport, demandthat they entertain or be ignored into oblivion. And itis a great tragedy, for the work o f the writer has neverbeen more important than it is now in Amerika.Many see that in this nightmared land, language hasno meaning and the work o f the writer is ruined. Manysee that the triumph o f authoritarian consciousness isits ability to render the spoken and written word meaningless—sothat we cannot talk or hear each other speak.It is the work o f the writer to reclaim the language fromthose who use it to justify murder, plunder, violation.The writer can and must do the revolutionary work o fusing words to communicate, as community.Those o f us who love reading and writing believethat being a writer is a sacred trust. It means telling thetruth. It means being incorruptible. It means not beingafraid, and never lying. Those o f us who love readingand writing feel great pain because so many peoplewho write books have become cowards, clowns, andliars. Those o f us who love reading and writing beginto feel a deadly contempt for books, because we seewriters being bought and sold in the market place — wesee them vending their tarnished wares on every streetcorner. Too many writers, in keeping with the Amerikanway o f life, would sell their mothers for a dime.T o keep the sacred trust o f the writer is simply torespect the people and to love the community. T o violatethat trust is to abuse oneself and do damage toothers. I believe that the writer has a vital function inthe community, and an absolute responsibility to the

26 Woman Hatingpeople. I ask that this book be judged in that context.Specifically Woman Hating is about women andmen, the roles they play, the violence between them.We begin with fairy tales, the first scenarios of womenand men which mold our psyches, taught to us beforewe can know differently. We go on to pornography,where we find the same scenarios, explicitlysexual and now more recognizable, ourselves, carnalwomen and heroic men. We go on to herstory —thebinding of feet in China, the burning of witches inEurope and Amerika. There we see the fairy-tale andpornographic definitions of women functioning inreality, the real annihilation of real women —the crushinginto nothingness of their freedom, their will, theirlives —how they were forced to live, and how they wereforced to die. We see the dimensions of the crime, thedimensions of the oppression, the anguish and miserythat are a direct consequence of polar role definition,of women defined as carnal, evil, and Other. We recognizethat it is the structure of the culture which engineersthe deaths, violations, violence, and we look foralternatives, ways of destroying culture as we know it,rebuilding it as we can imagine it.I write however with a broken tool, a language whichis sexist and discriminatory to its core. I try to make thedistinctions, not “history” as the whole human story, not“man” as the generic term for the species, not “manhood”as the synonym for courage, dignity, andstrength. But I have not been successful in reinventingthe language.This work was not done in isolation. It owes much toothers. I thank my sisters who everywhere are standing

Introduction 27up, for themselves, against oppression. I thank my sisters,the women who are searching into our commonpast, writing it so that we can know it and be proud. Ithank my sisters, these particular women whose workhas contributed so much to my own consciousness andresolve — Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, Shulamith Firestone,Judith Malina, and Jill Johnston.I also thank those others who have, through theirbooks and lives, taught me so much —in particular,Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Daniel Berrigan, JeanGenet, Huey P. Newton, Julian Beck, and TimothyLeary.I thank my friends in Amsterdam who were familyfor the writing o f much o f this book and who helpedme in very hard times.I thank Mel Clay who believed in this book from itsmost obscure beginnings, the editors o f Suck and inparticular Susan Janssen, Deborah Rogers, MartinDuberman, and Elaine Markson who has been wonderfulto me. I thank Marian Skedgell for her help andkindness. I thank Brian Murphy who tried to tell me along time ago that O was an oppressed person. Chapter3 is dedicated to Brian.I thank Karen Malpede and Garland Harris for theirsupport and help. I thank Joan Schenkar for pushingme a little further than I was willing, or able, to go.I thank Grace Paley, Karl Bissinger, KathleenNorris, and Muriel Rukeyser. Without their love andfriendship this work would never have been done.Without their examples o f strength and commitment,I do not know who I would be, or how.I thank my brother Mark and my sister-in-law Carol

28 Woman Hatingfor their friendship, warmth, and trust. And I thankmy parents, Sylvia and Harry Dworkin, for their devotionand support through all these years, which musthave seemed to them interminable, when their daughterwas learning her craft. I thank them for raising mewith real caring and tenderness, for believing in me sothat I could learn to believe in myself.Andrea DworkinNew York City, July 1973

Part OneTHE FAIRY TALESYou cannot be free if you are containedwithin a fiction.Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

Once upon a time there was a wicked witch and hername wasLilithEveHagarJezebelDelilahPandoraJahiTamarand there was a wicked witch and she was also calledgoddess and her name wasKaliFatimaArtemisHeraIsisMaryIshtarand there was a wicked witch and she was also calledqueen and her name wasBathsheba31

32 Woman HatingVashtiCleopatraHelenSalomeElizabethClytemnestraMedeaand there was a wicked witch and she was also calledwitch and her name wasJoanCirceMorgan le FayTiamatMaria LeonzaMedusaand they had this in common: that they were feared,hated, desired, and worshiped.When one enters the world of fairy tale one seekswith difficulty for the actual place where legend andhistory part. One wants to locate the precise momentwhen fiction penetrates into the psyche as reality, andhistory begins to mirror it. Or vice versa. Womenlive in fairy tale as magical figures, as beauty, danger,innocence, malice, and gr eed. In the personae of thefairy tale —the wicked witch, the beautiful princess,the heroic prince —we find what the culture would haveus know about who we are.The point is that we have not formed that ancientworld —it has formed us. We ingested it as childrenwhole, had its values and consciousness imprinted onour minds as cultural absolutes long before we were infact men and women. We have taken the fairy tales of

Woman Hating 33childhood with us into maturity, chewed but still lyingin the stomach, as real identity. Between Snow-whiteand her heroic prince, our two great fictions, we neverdid have much o f a chance. At some point, the GreatDivide took place: they (the boys) dreamed o f mountingthe Great Steed and buying Snow-white from thedwarfs; we (the girls) aspired to become that object o fevery necrophiliac’s lust —the innocent, victimized SleepingBeauty, beauteous lump o f ultimate, sleeping good.Despite ourselves, sometimes unknowing, sometimesknowing, unwilling, unable to do otherwise, we act outthe roles we were taught.Here is the beginning, where we learn who we mustbe, as well as the moral o f the story.

CHAPTER 1Onceuponatime: The RolesDeath is that remedy all singers dream ofAllen GinsbergThe culture predetermines who we are, how we behave,what we are willing to know, what we are able to feel.We are bom into a sex role which is determined byvisible sex, or gender.We follow explicit scenarios of passage from birthinto youth into maturity into old age, and then we die.In the process of adhering to sex roles, as a directconsequence of the imperatives of those roles, we commithomicide, suicide, and genocide.Death is our only remedy. We imagine heaven.There is no suffering there, we say. There is no sexthere, we say. We mean, there is no culture there.We mean, there is no gender there. We dream thatdeath will release us from suffering—from guilt, sex,the body. We recognize the body as the source of oursuffering. We dream of a death which will mean freedomfrom it because here on earth, in our bodies,we are fragmented, anguished—either men or women,bound by the very fact of a particularized body to a rolewhich is annihilating, totalitarian, which forbids us anyreal self-becoming or self-realization.Fairy tales are the primary information of the culture.They delineate the roles, interactions, and valueswhich are available to us. They are our childhood34

Onceuponatime: The Roles 35models, and their fearful, dreadful content terrorizesus into submission — if we do not become good, then evilwill destroy us; if we do not achieve the happy ending,then we will drown in the chaos. As we grow up, weforget the terror—the wicked witches and their smotheringmalice. We remember romantic paradigms: theheroic prince kisses Sleeping Beauty; the heroic princesearches his kingdom to find Cinderella; the heroicprince marries Snow-white. But the terror remains asthe substratum o f male-female relation — the terrorremains, and we do not ever recover from it or cease tobe motivated by it. Grown men are terrified o f thewicked witch, internalized in the deepest parts o f memory.Women are no less terrified, for we know that notto be passive, innocent, and helpless is to be activelyevil.Terror, then, is our real theme.The Mother as a Figure of TerrorWhether “instinctive” or not, the maternalrole in the sexual constitution originatesin the fact that only the woman isnecessarily present at birth. Only thewoman has a dependable and easily identifiableconnection to the child —a tie onwhich society can rely. This maternal feelingis the root of human community.George Gilder, Sexual SuicideSnow-white’s biological mother was a passive, goodqueen who sat at her window and did embroidery.She pricked her finger one day —no doubt an event inher life —and 3 drops o f blood fell from it onto the

36 Woman Hatingsnow. Somehow that led her to wish for a child “as whiteas snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of theembroidery frame.” 1 Soon after, she had a daughterwith “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, andhair as black as ebony. ” 2Then, she died.A year later, the king married again. His new wifewas beautiful, greedy, and proud. She was, in fact,ambitious and recognized that beauty was coin in themale realm, that beauty translated directly into powerbecause it meant male admiration, male alliance, maledevotion.The new queen had a magic mirror and she wouldask it: “Looking-glass upon the wall, Who is fairestof us all? ” 3 And inevitably, the queen was the fairest(had there been anyone fairer we can presume that theking would have married her).One day the queen asked her mirror who the fairestwas, and the mirror answered: “Queen, you are fullfair, *tis true, But Snow-white fairer is than you. ” 4Snow-white was 7 years old.The queen became “yellow and green with envy,and from that hour her heart turned against Snowwhite,and she hated her. And envy and pride like illweeds grew in her heart higher every day, until she hadno peace.... ” 5Now, we all know what nations will do to achievepeace, and the queen was no less resourceful (she wouldhave made an excellent head of state). She ordered ahuntsman to take Snow-white to the forest, kill her, andbring back her heart. The huntsman, an uninspiredgood guy, could not kill the sweet young thing, so heturned her loose in the forest, killed a boar, and took its

Onceuponatime: The Roles 37heart back to the queen. T he heart was “salted andcooked, and the wicked woman ate it up, thinking thatthere was an end o f Snow-white. ” 6Snow-white found her way to the home o f the 7dwarfs, who told her that she could stay with them “ifyou will keep our house for us, and cook, and wash, andmake the beds, and sew and knit, and keep everythingtidy and clean. ” 7 They simply adored her.The queen, who can now be called with convictionthe wicked queen, found out from her mirror that Snowwhitewas still alive and fairer than she. She tried severaltimes to kill Snow-white, who fell into numerous deepsleeps but never quite died. Finally the wicked queenmade a poisoned apple and induced the ever vigilantSnow-white to bite into it. Snow-white did die, or becamemore dead than usual, because the wicked queen’smirror then verified that she was the fairest in the land.The dwarfs, who loved Snow-white, could not bearto bury her under the ground, so they enclosed her in aglass coffin and put the coffin on a mountaintop. Theheroic prince was just passing that way, immediatelyfell in love with Snow-white-under-glass, and boughther (it? ) from the dwarfs who loved her (it? ). As servantscarried the coffin along behind the prince’s horse, thepiece o f poisoned apple that Snow-white had swallowed“flew out o f her throat. ” 8 She soon revived fully, thatis to say, not much. The prince placed her squarely inthe “it” category, and marriage in its proper perspectivetoo, when he proposed wedded bliss —“I would ratherhave you than anything in the world. ” 9 The wickedqueen was invited to the wedding, which she attendedbecause her mirror told her that the bride was fairer

Woman Halingthan she. At the wedding “they had ready red-hot ironshoes, in which she had to dance until she fell downdead. ” 10Cinderella’s mother-situation was the same. Herbiological mother was good, pious, passive, and soondead. Her stepmother was greedy, ambitious, and ruthless.Her ambition dictated that her own daughtersmake good marriages. Cinderella meanwhile was forcedto do heavy domestic work, and when her work wasdone, her stepmother would throw lentils into the ashesof the stove and make Cinderella separate the lentilsfrom the ashes. The stepmother’s malice toward Cinderellawas not free-floating and irrational. On thecontrary, her own social validation was contingent onthe marriages she made for her own daughters. Cinderellawas a real threat to her. Like Snow-white’s stepmother,for whom beauty was power and to be the mostbeautiful was to be the most powerful, Cinderella’sstepmother knew how the social structure operated,and she was determined to succeed on its terms.Cinderella’s stepmother was presumably motivatedby maternal love for her own biological offspring. Maternallove is known to be transcendent, holy, noble,and unselfish. It is coincidentally also a fundament ofhuman (male-dominated) civilization and it is the realbasis of human (male-dominated) sexuality:[When the prince began to search for the woman whosefoot would fit the golden slipper] the two sisters werevery glad, because they had pretty feet. The eldestwent to her room to try on the shoe, and her motherstood by. But she could not get her great toe into it,

Onceuponatime: The Roles 39for the shoe was too small; then her mother handedher a knife, and said,“Cut the toe off, for when you are queen you willnever have to go on foot. ” So the girl cut her toe off,and squeezed her foot into the shoe, concealed thepain, and went down to the prince. Then he took herwith him on his horse as his bride....Then the prince looked at her shoe, and saw theblood flowing. And he turned his horse round andtook the false bride home again, saying that she wasnot the right one, and that the other sister must tryon the shoe. So she went into her room to do so, andgot her toes comfortably in, but her heel was too large.Then her mother handed her the knife, saying, “Cuta piece off your heel; when you are queen you willnever have to go on foot. ”So the girl cut a piece off her heel, and thrust herfoot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went downto the prince, who took his bride....Then the prince looked at her foot, and saw howthe blood was flowing. . . . 11Cinderella’s stepmother understood correctly that heronly real work in life was to marry off her daughters.Her goal was upward mobility, and her ruthlessness wasconsonant with the values o f the market place.* Sheloved her daughters the way Nixon loves the freedom o fthe Indochinese, and with much the same result. Lovein a male-dominated society certainly is a many-splendoredthing.Rapunzel’s mother wasn’t exactly a winner either.* This depiction of women as flesh on an open market, of crippling andmutilation for the sake of making a good marriage, is not fiction; cf. Chapter6, “Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding. ”

40 Woman HatingShe had a maternal instinct all right—she had “longwished for a child, but in vain. ” 12 Sometime during herwishing, she developed a craving for rampion, a vegetablewhich grew in the garden of her neighbor andpeer, the witch. She persuaded her husband to stealrampion from the witch’s garden, and each day shecraved more. When the witch discovered the theft, shemade this offer:. . . you may have as much rampion as you like, onone condition — the child that will come into the worldmust be given to me. It shall go well with the child, andI will care for it like a mother. 13Mama didn’t think twice —she traded Rapunzel for avegetable. Rapunzel’s surrogate mother, the witch, didnot do much better by her:When she was twelve years old the witch shut her upin a tower in the midst of a wood, and it had neithersteps nor door, only a small window above. When thewitch wished to be let in, she would stand below and“Rapunzel, Rapunzel! let down your hair!” 14The heroic prince, having finished with Snow-whiteand Cinderella, now happened upon Rapunzel. Whenthe witch discovered the liaison, she beat up Rapunzel,cut off her hair, and cloistered her “in a waste anddesert place, where she lived in great woe and misery. ” 15The witch then confronted the prince, who fell from thetower and blinded himself on thorns. (He recoveredwhen he found Rapunzel, and they then lived happilyever after. )

Onceuponatime: The Roles 41Hansel and Grethel had a mother too. She simplyabandoned them:I will tell you what, husband.. . . We will take thechildren early in the morning into the forest, whereit is thickest; we will make them a fire, and we will giveeach of them a piece of bread, then we will go to ourwork and leave them alone; they will never find theway home again, and we shall be quit of them. 16Hungry, lost, frightened, the children find a candyhouse which belongs to an old lady who is kind to them,feeds them, houses them. She greets them as her children,and proves her maternal commitment by preparingto cannibalize them.These fairy-tale mothers are mythological femalefigures. They define for us the female character anddelineate its existential possibilities. When she is good,she is soon dead. In fact, when she is good, she is so passivein life that death must be only more o f the same.Here we discover the cardinal principle o f sexist ontology—theonly good woman is a dead woman. Whenshe is bad she lives, or when she lives she is bad. Shehas one real function, motherhood. In that function,because it is active, she is characterized by overwhelmingmalice, devouring greed, uncontainable avarice.She is ruthless, brutal, ambitious, a danger to childrenand other living things. Whether called mother, queen,stepmother, or wicked witch, she is the wicked witch,the content o f nightmare, the source o f terror.

42 Woman HalingThe Beauteous Lump of Ultimate GoodWhat can it do? It grows,It bleeds. It sleeps.It walks. It talks,Singing, “love’s got me, got me. ”Kathleen NorrisFor a woman to be good, she must be dead, or asclose to it as possible. Catatonia is the good woman’smost winning quality.Sleeping Beauty slept for 100 years, after prickingher finger on a spindle. The kiss of the heroic princewoke her. He fell in love with her while she was asleep,or was it because she was asleep?Snow-white was already dead when the heroic princefell in love with her. “I beseech you, ” he pleaded withthe 7 dwarfs, “to give it to me, for I cannot live withoutlooking upon Snow-white. ” 17 It awake was not readilydistinguishable from it asleep.Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow-white, Rapunzel—all are characterized by passivity, beauty, innocence,and victimization. They are archetypal good women —victims by definition. They never think, act, initiate,confront, resist, challenge, feel, care, or question. Sometimesthey are forced to do housework.They have one scenario of passage. They are moved,as if inert, from the house of the mother to the houseof the prince. First they are objects of malice, then theyare objects of romantic adoration. They do nothing towarrant either.That one other figure of female good, the goodfairy, appears from time to time, dispensing clothes

Onceuponatime: The Roles 43or virtue. Her power cannot match, only occasionallymoderate, the power o f the wicked witch. She does haveone physical activity at which she excels —she waves herwand. She is beautiful, good, and unearthly. Mostly,she disappears.These figures o f female good are the heroic modelsavailable to women. And the end o f the story is, it wouldseem, the goal o f any female life. T o sleep, perchanceto dream?The Prince, the Real BrotherThe man of flesh and bone; the man whois bom, suffers, and dies—above all, whodies; the man who eats and drinks andplays and sleeps and thinks and wills; theman who is seen and heard; the brother,the real brother.Miguel de Unamuno,Tragic Sense of LifeHe is handsome and heroic. He is a prince, that is,he is powerful, noble, and good. He rides a horse. Hetravels far and wide. He has a mission, a purpose. Inevitablyhe fulfills it. He is a person o f worth and aworthwhile person. He is strong and true.O f course, he is not real, and men do suffer trying tobecome him. They suffer, and murder, and rape, andplunder. They use airplanes now.What matters is that he is both powerful and good,that his power is by definition good. What matters isthat he matters, acts, succeeds.One can point out that in fact he is not very bright.

44 Woman HalingFor instance, he cannot distinguish Cinderella from hertwo sisters though he danced with her and presumablyconversed with her. His recurring love of corpses doesnot indicate a dynamic intelligence either. His fall fromthe tower onto thorns does not suggest that he is evenphysically coordinated, though, unlike his moderncounterparts, he never falls off his horse or annihilatesthe wrong village.The truth of it is that he is powerful and good whencontrasted with her. The badder she is, the better he is.The deader she is, the better he is. That is one moral ofthe story, the reason for dual role definition, and theshabby reality of the man as hero.The Husband, the Real FatherThe desire of men to claim their childrenmay be the crucial impulse of civilizedlife.George Gilder, Sexual SuicideMostly they are kings, or noble and rich. They are,again by definition, powerful and good. They are neverresponsible or held accountable for the evil done bytheir wicked wives. Most of the time, they do not noticeit.There is, of course, no rational basis for consideringthem either powerful or good. For while they are governing,or kinging, or whatever it is that they do do,their wives are slaughtering and abusing their belovedprogeny. But then, in some cultures nonfairy-tale

Onceuponatime: The Roles 45fathers simply had their female children killed at birth.Cinderella’s father saw her every day. He saw herpicking lentils out o f the ashes, dressed in rags, degraded,insulted. He was a good man.The father o f Hansel and Grethel also had a goodheart. When his wife proposed to him that they abandonthe children in the forest to starve he protested immediately—“ButI really pity the poor children. ” 18 WhenHansel and Grethel finally escaped the witch and foundtheir way home “they rushed in at the door, and fellon their father’s neck. The man had not had a quiethour since he left his children in the wood [Hansel,after all, was a boy]; but the wife was dead. ” 19 Do notmisunderstand —they did not forgive him, for there wasnothing to forgive. All malice originated with thewoman. He was a good man.Though the fairy-tale father marries the evil womanin the first place, has no emotional connection with hischild, does not interact in any meaningful way withher, abandons her and worse does not notice when sheis dead and gone, he is a figure o f male good. He is thepatriarch, and as such he is beyond moral law and humandecency.The roles available to women and men are clearlyarticulated in fairy tales. The characters o f each arevividly described, and so are the modes o f relationshippossible between them. We see that powerful womenare bad, and that good women are inert. We see thatmen are always good, no matter what they do, or donot do.We also have an explicit rendering o f the nuclear

Woman Hatingfamily. In that family, a mother’s love is destructive,murderous. In that family, daughters are objects, expendable.The nuclear family, as we find it delineatedin fairy tales, is a paradigm of male being-in-the-world,female evil, and female victimization. It is a crystalizationof sexist culture —the nuclear structure of thatculture.

CHAPTER 2Onceuponatime: The Moralof the StoryFuck that to death, the dead are holy,Honor the sisters of your friends.Pieces of ass, a piece of action,Pieces.The loneliest of morningsSomething moves about in the mirror.A slave’s trick, survival.I remember thinking, our last time:If you killed me, I would die.Kathleen NorrisI cannot live without my life.Emily BronteThe lessons are simple, and we learn them well.Men and women are different, absolute opposites.The heroic prince can never be confused with Cinderella,or Snow-white, or Sleeping Beauty. She couldnever do what he does at all, let alone better.Men and women are different, absolute opposites.The good father can never be confused with the badmother. Their qualities are different, polar.Where he is erect, she is supine. Where he is awake,she is asleep. Where he is active, she is passive. Where47

48 Woman Hatingshe is erect, or awake, or active, she is evil and must bedestroyed.It is, structurally at least, that simple.She is desirable in her beauty, passivity, and victimization.She is desirable because she is beautiful,passive, and victimized.Her other persona, the evil mother, is repulsive inher cruelty. She is repulsive and she must be destroyed.She is the female protagonist, the nonmale source ofpower which must be defeated, obliterated, before malepower can fully flower. She is repulsive because she isevil. She is evil because she acts.She, the evil persona, is a cannibal. Cannibalism isrepulsive. She is devouring and magical. She is devouringand the male must not be devoured.There are two definitions of woman. There is thegood woman. She is a victim. There is the bad woman.She must be destroyed. The good woman must bepossessed. The bad woman must be killed, or punished.Both must be nullified.The bad woman must be punished, and if she ispunished enough, she will become good. To be punishedenough is to be destroyed. There is the goodwoman. She is the victim. The posture of victimization,the passivity of the victim demands abuse.Women strive for passivity, because women want tobe good. The abuse evoked by that passivity convinceswomen that they are bad. The bad need to be punished,destroyed, so that they can become good.Even a woman who strives conscientiously for passivitysometimes does something. That she acts at allprovokes abuse. The abuse provoked by that activity

Onceuponatlme: The Moral of the Story 49convinces her that she is bad. The bad need to be punished,destroyed, so that they can become good.T he moral o f the story should, one would think,preclude a happy ending. It does not. T he moral o f thestory is the happy ending. It tells us that happiness fora woman is to be passive, victimized, destroyed, orasleep. It tells us that happiness is for the woman whois good —inert, passive, victimized—and that a goodwoman is a happy woman. It tells us that the happy endingis when we are ended, when we live without ourlives or not at all.

Part TwoTHE PORNOGRAPHYAmong my brethren are many who dreamwith wet pleasure of the eight hundredpains and humiliations, but I am the otherkind: I am a slave who dreams of escapeafter escape, I dream only of escaping,ascent, of a thousand possible ways tomake a hole in the wall, of melting thebars, escape escape, of burning the wholeprison down if necessary.Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

Bookshop shelves are lined with pornography. It is astaple o f the market place, and where it is illegal itflourishes and prices soar. From The Beautiful Flagellantsof New York to Twelve Inches around the World, cheapeditioned,overpriced renditions o f fucking, sucking,whipping, footlicking, gangbanging, etc., in all o f theirmanifold varieties are available — whether in the supermarketor on the black market. Most literary pornographyis easily describable: repetitious to the point o finducing catatonia, ill-conceived, simple-minded, brutal,and very ugly. Why, then, do we spend our moneyon it? Why, then, is it erotically stimulating for masseso f men and women?Literary pornography is the cultural scenario ofmale/female. It is the collective scenario o f master/slave. It contains cultural truth: men and women, grownnow out o f the fairy-tale landscape into the castles o ferotic desire; woman, her carnality adult and explicit,her role as victim adult and explicit, her guilt adultand explicit, her punishment lived out on her flesh, herend annihilation —death or complete submission.Pornography, like fairy tale, tells us who we are. It53

54 Woman Hatingis the structure of male and female mind, the contentof our shared erotic identity, the map of each inch andmile of our oppression and despair. Here we move beyondchildhood terror. Here the fear is clammy andreal, and rightly so. Here we are compelled to ask thereal questions: why are we defined in these ways, andhow can we bear it?

CHAPTER 3Woman as Victim:Story of OThe Story of O, by Pauline Reage, incorporates, alongwith all literary pornography, principles and charactersalready isolated in my discussion o f children’s fairytales. T he female as a figure o f innocence and evil entersthe adult world—the brutal world o f genitalia.The female manifests in her adult form —cunt. Sheemerges defined by the hole between her legs. In addition,Story of O is more than simple pornography. Itclaims to define epistemologically what a woman is,what she needs, her processes o f thinking and feeling,her proper place. It links men and women in an eroticdance o f some magnitude: the sado-masochistic complexiono f O is not trivial —it is formulated as a cosmicprinciple which, articulates, absolutely, the feminine.Also, O is particularly compelling for me because Ionce believed it to be what its defenders claim —themystical revelation o f the true, eternal, and sacraldestiny o f women. T he book was absorbed as a pulsating,erotic, secular Christianity (the joy in pure suffering,woman as Christ figure). I experienced O with thesame infantile abandon as the Newsweek reviewer whowrote: “What lifts this fascinating book above mere55

56 Woman Halingperversity is its movement toward the transcendenceof the self through a gift of the self. . . to give the body,to allow it to be ravaged, exploited, and totally possessedcan be an act of consequence, if it is done withlove for the sake of love. ” 1 Any clear-headed appraisalof O will show the situation, O’s condition, her behavior,and most importantly her attitude toward heroppressor as a logical scenario incorporating Judeo-Christian values of service and self-sacrifice and universalnotions of womanhood, a logical scenario demonstratingthe psychology of submission and self-hatredfound in all oppressed peoples. O is a book of astoundingpolitical significance.This is, then, the story of O: O is taken by her loverRene to Roissy and cloistered there; she is fucked,sucked, raped, whipped, humiliated, and tortured on aregular and continuing basis —she is programmed tobe an erotic slave, Rene’s personal whore; after beingproperly trained she is sent home with her lover; herlover gives her to Sir Stephen, his half-brother; she isfucked, sucked, raped, whipped, humiliated, and torturedon a regular and continuing basis; she is orderedto become the lover of Jacqueline and to recruit her forRoissy, which she does; she is sent to Anne-Marie to bebranded with Sir Stephen’s mark and to have rings withhis insignia inserted in her cunt; she serves as an eroticmodel for Jacqueline’s younger sister Natalie who isinfatuated with her; she is taken to a party masked asan owl, led on a leash by Natalie, and there plundered,despoiled, raped, gangbanged; realizing that there isnothing else left for Sir Stephen to do with her or to her,fearing that he will abandon her, she asks his permis-

Woman as Victim: Story of O 57sion to kill herself and receives it. Q . E. D., pornographyis never big on plot.O f course, like most summaries, the above is somewhatsketchy. I have not mentioned the quantities o fcock that O sucks, or the anal assaults that she sustains,or the various rapes and tortures perpetrated on her byminor characters in the book, or the varieties o f whipsused, or described her clothing or the different kinds o fnipple rouge, or the many ways in which she is chained,or the shapes and colors o f the welts on her body.From the course o f O ’s story emerges a clear mythologicalfigure: she is woman, and to name her O, zero,emptiness, says it all. Her ideal state is one o f completepassivity, nothingness, a submission so absolute thatshe transcends human form (in becoming an owl). Onlythe hole between her legs is left to define her, and thesymbol o f that hole must surely be O. Much, however,even in the rarefied environs o f pornography, necessarilyinterferes with the attainment o f utter passivity.Given a body which takes up space, has needs, makesdemands, is connected, even symbolically, to a personalhistory which is a sequence o f likes, dislikes, skills,opinions, one is formed, shaped—one exists at the veryleast as positive space. And since in addition as a womanone is born guilty and carnal, personifying the sins o fEve and Pandora, the wickedness o f Jezebel and LucretiaBorgia, O ’s transcendence o f the species is trulyphenomenal.The thesis o f O is simple. Woman is cunt, lustful,wanton. She must be punished, tamed, debased. Shegives the gift o f herself, her body, her well-being,her life, to her lover. This is as it should be —natural

58 Woman Hatingand good. It ends necessarily in her annihilation, whichis also natural and good, as well as beautiful, becauseshe fulfills her destiny:As long as I am beaten and ravished on your behalf, Iam naught but the thought of you, the desire of you,the obsession of you. That, I believe, is what youwanted. Well, I love you, and that is what I want too. 2Then let him take her, if only to wound her! O hatedherself for her own desire, and loathed Sir Stephenfor the self-control he was displaying. She wanted himto love her, there, the truth was out: she wanted himto be chafing under the urge to touch her lips andpenetrate her body, to devastate her if need be. . . . 3. . . Yet he was certain that she was guilty and, withoutreally wanting to, Rene was punishing her for a sinhe knew nothing about (since it remained completelyinternal), although Sir Stephen had immediately detectedit: her wantonness. 4. . . no pleasure, no joy, no figment of her imaginationcould ever compete with the happiness she felt at theway he used her with such utter freedom, at the notionthat he could do anything with her, that there was nolimit, no restriction in the manner with which, on herbody, he might search for pleasure. 5O is totally possessed. That means that she is anobject, with no control over her own mobility, capableof no assertion of personality. Her body is a body, inthe same way that a pencil is a pencil, a bucket is abucket, or, as Gertrude Stein pointedly said, a rose isa rose. It also means that O’s energy, or power, as awoman, as Woman, is absorbed. Possession here denotesa biological transference of power which brings

Woman as Victim: Story of O 59with it a commensurate spiritual strength to the possessor.O does more than offer herself; she is herself theoffering. T o offer herself would be prosaic Christianself-sacrifice, but as the offering she is the vehicle o fthe miraculous—she incorporates the divine.Here sacrifice has its ancient, primal meaning:that which was given at the beginning becomes the gift.T he first fruits o f the harvest were dedicated to andconsumed by the vegetation spirit which provided them.The destruction o f the victim in human or animalsacrifice or the consumption o f the offering was thevery definition o f the sacrifice—death was necessarybecause the victim was or represented the life-givingsubstance, the vital energy source, which had to beliberated, which only death could liberate. An actualdeath, the sacrifice per se, not only liberated benevolentenergy but also ensured a propagation and increase o flife energy (concretely expressed as fertility) by a sorto f magical ecology, a recycling o f basic energy, or rawpower. O ’s victimization is the confirmation o f herpower, a power which is transcendental and which hasas its essence the sacred processes o f life, death, andregeneration.But the full significance o f possession, both mysticallyand mythologically, is not yet clear. In mysticexperience communion (wrongly called possessionsometimes) has meant the dissolution o f the ego, theentry into ecstasy, union with and illumination o f thegodhead. T he experience o f communion has been theprovince o f the mystic, prophet, or visionary, those whowere able to alchemize their energy into pure spiritand this spirit into a state o f grace. Possession, rightly

60 Woman Hatingdefined, is the perversion of the mystic experience; it isby its very nature demonic because its goal is power,its means are violence and oppression. It spills the bloodof its victim and in doing so estranges itself from lifegivingunion. O’s lover thinks that she gives herselffreely but if she did not, he would take her anyway.Their relationship is the incarnation of demonic possession:Thus he would possess her as a god possesses hiscreatures, whom he lays hold of in the guise of a monsteror bird, of an invisible spirit or a state of ecstasy.He did not wish to leave her. The more he surrenderedher, the more he would hold her dear. The fact thathe gave her was to him a proof, and ought to be forher as well, that she belonged to him: one can onlygive what belongs to you. He gave her only to reclaimher immediately, to reclaim her enriched in his eyes,like some common object which had been used for somedivine purpose and has thus been consecrated. For along time he had wanted to prostitute her, and he wasdelighted to feel that the pleasure he was derivingwas even greater than he had hoped, and that it boundhim to her all the more so because, through it, shewould be more humiliated and ravished. Since sheloved him, she could not help loving whatever derivedfrom him. 6A precise corollary of possession is prostitution. Theprostitute, the woman as object, is defined by the usageto which the possessor puts her. Her subjugation is thesignet of his power. Prostitution means for the womanthe carnal annihilation of will and choice, but for theman it once again signifies an increase in power, pureand simple. To call the power of the possessor, which he

Woman as Victim: Story of O 61demonstrates by playing superpimp, divine, or to confuseit with ecstasy or communion, is to grossly misunderstand.“All the mouths that had probed hermouth, all the hands that had seized her breasts andbelly, all the members that had been thrust into her hadso perfectly provided the living proof that she wasworthy o f being prostituted and had, so to speak, sanctifiedher. ” 7 O f course, it is not O who is sanctified,but Rene, or Sir Stephen, or the others, through her.O ’s prostitution is a vicious caricature o f old-worldreligious prostitution. The ancient sacral prostitutiono f the Hebrews, Greeks, Indians, et al., was the ritualexpression o f respect and veneration for the powers o ffertility and generation. The priestesses/prostitutes o fthe temple were literal personifications o f the life energyof the earth goddess, and transferred that energy tothose who participated in her rites. The cosmic principles,articulated as divine male and divine female, wereritually united in the temple because clearly only throughtheir continuing and repeated union could the fertilityof the earth and the well-being o f a people be ensured.Sacred prostitution was “nothing less than an act ofcommunion with god (or godhead) and was as remotefrom sensuality as the Christian act o f communion isremote from gluttony. ” 8 O and all of the women atRoissy are distinguished by their sterility and bear noresemblance whatsoever to any known goddess. Nomention is ever made o f conception or menstruation,and procreation is never a consequence o f fucking. O ’sfertility has been rendered O. There is nothing sacredabout O ’s prostitution.O ’s degradation is occasioned by the male need for

62 Woman Hatingand fear of initiation into manhood. Initiation ritesgenerally include a period of absolute solitude, isolation,followed by tests of physical courage, mental endurance,often through torture and physical mutilation,resulting in a permanent scar or tattoo which marks thesuccessful initiate. The process of initiation is designedto reveal the values, rites, and rules of manhood andconfers on the initiate the responsibilities and privilegesof manhood. What occurs at Roissy is a clear perversionof real initiation. Rene and the others mutilate O’sbody, but they are themselves untouched. Her bodysubstitutes for their bodies. O is marked with the scarswhich they should bear. She undergoes their ordealfor them, endures the solitude and isolation, the torture,the mutilation. In trying to become gods, theyhave bypassed the necessary rigors of becoming men.The fact that the tortures must be repeated endlessly,not only on O but on large numbers of women who areforced as well as persuaded, demonstrates that the menof Roissy never in fact become men, are never initiates,never achieve the security of realized manhood.What would be the sign of the initiate, the final markor scar, manifests in the case of O as an ultimate expressionof sadism. The rings through O’s cunt with SirStephen’s name and heraldry, and the brand on her ass,are permanent wedding rings rightly placed. Theymark her as an owned object and in no way symbolizethe passage into maturity and freedom. The same mightbe said of the conventional wedding ring.O, in her never-ending role as surrogate everything,also is the direct sexual link between Sir Stephen andRene. That the two men love each other and fuck each

Woman as Victim: Story of O 63other through O is made clear by the fact that SirStephen uses O anally most o f the time. The consequenceso f misdirecting sexual energy are awesomeindeed.But what is most extraordinary about Story of O isthe mind-boggling literary style o f Pauline Reage, itsauthor. O is wanton yet pure, Sir Stephen is cruel yetkind, Rene is brutal yet gentle, a wall is black yet white.Everything is what it is, what it isn’t, and its direct opposite.That technique, which is so skillfully executed,might help to account for the compelling irrationalityo f Story of O. For those women who are convinced yetdoubtful, attracted yet repelled, there is this schema forself-protection: the double-double think that the authorengages in is very easy to deal with if we just realize that weonly have to double-double unthink it.T o sum up, Story of O is a story o f psychic cannibalism,demonic possession, a story which posits men andwomen as being at opposite poles o f the universe — thesurvival o f one dependent on the absolute destructionof the other. It asks, like many stories, who is the mostpowerful, and it answers: men are, literally over women’sdead bodies.

CHAPTER 4Woman as Victim:The ImageThe Image, by Jean de Berg, is a love story, a Christianlove story and also a story of Christian love. No bookmakes more clear the Christian experience of womanafter the fall, as we know her, Eve’s unfortunate descendant.The Image, like the catechism, is a handbookof Christianity in action. In addition, The Image is analmost clinical dissection of role-playing and its sexrelatedness,of duality as the structural basis of malefemaleviolence.It would be an exaggeration of some substance tocall the following a summary of plot, but what happensin The Image is this: Jean de Berg, the auteur of TheImage, meets Claire, whom he has known casually formany years, at a party; he has always been interested inher, but her coldness, aloofness, and perfect beautymade her lack the necessary vulnerability which wouldhave made her, in the veni, vidi, vici tradition, a desirableconquest; Claire introduces him to Anne, InnocentYoung Girl Dressed In White, who, it turns out, isClaire’s slave; they go to a bar where Anne is offered toJean de Berg; they go to a rose garden where Annesticks a rose by its thorns into the flesh of her cunt;64

Woman as Victim: The Image 65they go to a restaurant where Claire shames Anne, anevent often repeated (Claire shames Anne by orderingher to raise her skirt, or lower her blouse, or by stickingher finger up Anne’s cunt); Claire shows Jean deBerg photographs in the artsy-craftsy sadomasochistictradition for which Anne modeled, except for the lastphotograph, which is clearly a photo o f Claire herself;Claire whips Anne; Anne sucks Jean de Berg’s cock;Jean de Berg takes Anne to buy lingerie and humiliatesAnne and embarrasses the salesgirl by exhibiting Anne’swhip scars which are fresh; Anne is given a bath byClaire in Jean de Berg’s presence in which Anne isalmost drowned (erotically); it occurs to Jean de Bergthat he would like to fuck Claire —which causes Claireto increase the viciousness o f her assaults on Anne;Anne is tortured in the Gothic chamber and then ravagedanally by Jean de Berg; Jean de Berg goes home,has a dream about Claire, is awakened by a knock onthe door, and lo and behold! Claire has recognized hertrue role in life (“ ‘I have come, ’ she said quietly”) 1 —that o f Jean de Berg’s slave. He hits her, and she liveshappily ever after.O f course, the above is again somewhat sketchy. Idid not mention that Anne was forced to piss in publicin the rose garden, or how she was nasty to Jean de Bergin a bookstore (a crucial point —since she then had tobe punished), or how she fetched the whips herself, orhow she was made to serve Claire and Jean de Bergorangeade before they stuck burning needles in herbreasts.The characterizations have even less depth and complexity,not to mention subtlety and sensitivity, than the

66 Woman Hatingplot. Claire is cold and aloof. Jean de Berg describesher:Claire was very beautiful, as I said, probably evenmore beautiful than her friend in the white dress. Butunlike the latter, she had never aroused any real emotionin me. This astonished me at first, but then I toldmyself that it was her impeccable beauty, precisely,her very perfection that made it impossible to think ofher as a potential “conquest. ” I probably needed tofeel that some little thing about her, at least, was vulnerable,in order to arouse any desire in me to winher. 2He later writes: “Her classic features, her cold beauty,her remoteness made me think of some goddess inexile." 3 Here the female characterization is explicit:vulnerability as the main quality of the human; coldnessas the main quality of the goddess. As in most fiction,the female characterization is synonymous with an appraisalof the figure’s beauty, its type, and most importantly,its effect on the male figures in the book.Anne, who is, according to Pauline Reage, the otherhalf of Claire, is sweet, modest, vulnerable, young,demure (“Anne, for her part, had resumed the modestdemeanor of an object of lust” 4), and wanton. Clairesays that Anne creams at each new humiliation, at eventhe thought of being whipped. Anne appears to be Bethfrom Little Women but is, in fact, a bitch in heat, her cuntalways wet—just like the rest of us, we are meant toconclude. (Beth, remember, died young of goodness. )Jean de Berg, representing the male sex, is—wouldn’tyou know it—intelligent, self-assured, quietly master-

Woman at Victim: The Image 67ful and self-contained when not actually in the act o fravaging, powerful and overwhelmingly virile when inthe act o f ravaging. One has no idea o f his physicality,except to imagine that he is graying at the temples.The relationships between the three characters arestructured simply and a bit repetitively: Claire, master —Anne, slave; Jean de Berg, master —Anne, slave; whichresolves into the happy ending—Jean de Berg, master —Claire, slave. The master-slave motif is content, structure,and moral o f the story. The master role is alwaysa male role, the slave role is always a female role. Themoral o f the story is that Claire, by virtue o f her gender,can only find happiness in the female/slave role.Here we are told what society would have us knowabout lesbian relationships: a man is required for completion,consummation. Claire is miscast as master becauseo f her literal sex, her genitalia. Jean de Berg isher surrogate cock which she later forges into the instrumento f her own degradation. The Image paintswomen as real female eunuchs, mutilated in the firstinstance, much as Freud suggested, by their lack ofcock, incapable o f achieving whole, organic, satisfyingsexual union without the intrusion and participationo f a male figure. That figure cannot only act out themale role —that figure must possess biological cock andballs. Claire and Anne as biological females enact acomedy, grotesque in its slapstick caricature: Claireas master, a freak by virtue o f the role she wills to play,a role designed to suit the needs and capacities o f aman; Claire as master, as comic as Chaplin doing theking of France, or Laurel and Hardy falling over eachother’s feet in another vain attempt to secure wealth

68 Woman Hatingand success. After all, The Image forces us to conclude,what can Claire stick up Anne’s cunt but her fingers —hardly instruments of ravishment and ecstasy. Biology,we are told, is role. Biology, we are told, is fate. Themessage is strangely familiar.Pauline Reage, the major promoter of The Image asa piece of metaphysical veracity, sees the function,or very existence, of the man-master, as the glorificationof the woman-slave. Her thesis is that to be a slaveis to have power:. . . the all powerful slave, dragging herself along theground at her master’s heels, is now really the god.The man is only her priest, living in fear and tremblingof her displeasure. His sole function is to perform thevarious ceremonies that center around the sacred object.5With the logic indigenous to our dual-role culture, theslave is here transmuted into the source of power. Whatprice power, one asks in despair. This is truly the sourceof the male notion of female power—since she is at the centerof his obsession, she is powerful; no matter that the formher power takes is that she “drag herself along theground at her master’s heels. ”The man, Reage instructs us, has the illusion ofpower because he wields the whip. That illusion marksfor Reage the distance between carnal knowledge andwhat is, more profoundly, true:Yes, men are foolish to expect us to revere them when,in the end, they amount to almost nothing. Woman,like man himself, can only worship at the shrine of

Woman as Victim: The Image 69that abused body, now loved and now reviled, subjectedto every humiliation, but which is, after all,her own. The man, in this particular affair, stays in onepiece: he is the true worshiper, aspiring in vain tobecome one with his god.The woman, on the contrary, although just as muchof a true worshiper and possessed of that same anxiousregard (for herself) is also the divine object, violated,endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn, whose only joy,achieved through a subtle interplay of images, lies incontemplation of herself. 6Having noted in the last chapter Reage’s extraordinaryfacility with the double-double think, which she useshere with her usual skill, I must take exception to herconclusions. It is surprising that the worship o f thedivine object, the woman as victim and executioner,should involve any external mediation, especially thato f a male priest. Surely if woman is so willing to be thegiver and the offering, if as “the divine object, violated,endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn” her “only joy. . .lies in contemplation o f herself, ” a man is extraneous.Surely, with such divine endowments and attendantsatisfactions, she need not be coaxed or seduced intowhipping or mutilating herself (“And yet it is usually themen who introduce their mistresses to the joys of beingchained and whipped, tortured and humiliated.... ” 7),or initiating other women, who serve as a substitute ormirror image or other half. Men often insist that womenare self-serving, and indeed, Claire is Anne’s priestess.Both execute their roles effectively. No male figure isrequired mythologically unless Jean de Berg would playthe eunuch-priest, that traditional helpmate o f the

70 Woman Hatingpriestess, an honor no doubt not intended for him here.Conversely, only men have been permitted to servemale gods; eunuchs and women, synonymous here,have been strictly excluded from those holy rites. Theproper conclusion therefore is that man, not woman, isthe divine object of The Image: he is the priest; he servesa male god in whose image he was created; he serveshimself. Were that not the case, woman, as the worshiped,would serve herself, instead of serving herselfup like turkey or duck, garnished, stuffed, sharpenedknife ready for the ritual carving. That a man becomesthe master of the master means, despite Reage’s assertionsto the contrary, that women should serve men,that women are properly slaves and men properly masters,that men have the only meaningful power (in ourculture —that power allied to and defined by force andviolence), that men created in the image of the Almightyare all mighty. Single-single think brings us closer tothe truth in this instance than double-double think.The Image is rife with Christian symbolism. One ofthe more memorable sequences in the book takes placein a rose garden chosen by Claire as the proper prosceniumfor Anne’s humiliation. In the rose garden,Claire directs Jean de Berg’s attention to a specifictype of rose, special in its perfect beauty. Claire ordersAnne to step into the flowerbed and to fondle the rose,which Anne handles as though it were a moist, readycunt. Claire orders Anne to pick the rose and to bringit to her, which Anne does, though not before she feeblyprotests that there is a prohibition against picking theflowers and that she is afraid of the thorns. Anne’shesitation necessitates punishment. She is ordered to

Woman at Victim: The Image 71lift her dress while Claire first strokes Anne’s cunt withthe rose, then jabs the thorn into her thigh and tearsthe flesh very deliberately. Claire kisses Anne’s hands asa poetic drop o f blood flows. Claire then pushes thestem o f the rose into Anne’s garter belt. The thorn iscaught in the lace, and the flower is fastened, an adornmentfraught with symbolic meaning. Even Jean deBerg finds the performance a bit overdone:I answered that it was indeed a great success, althoughperhaps rather overburdened with symbols, inthe romantic and surrealist traditions. 8The rose as a symbol has powerful occult origins.Eliphas Levi says o f it:It was the flesh in rebellion against the oppressiono f spirit; it was Nature testifying that, like grace,she was a daughter o f God; it was love refusing to bestifled by the celibate; it was life in revolt againststerility; it was humanity aspiring towards naturalreligion, full o f reason and love, founded on therevelations o f the harmony o f being, o f which the rose,for initiates, was the living floral symbol. 9The rose became for Christian mystics “a rose o f lightin the center o f which a human figure is extending itsarms in the form o f a cross. ” 10 However, the officialChurch, in its unending struggle against carnality andnature, posited the rose as a symbol o f both in oppositionto the lily, which represented purity o f mind andbody. The Image takes a stand on the side o f officialChristianity by using the rose as an instrument o f painand blood-letting.

72 Woman HatingThe photographs which Claire shows to Jeande Berg are also overflowing with symbolic importance.The photographs are a series of conventional sadomasochisticposes. They chart the torture and mutilationof a victim, in this case Anne, and culminate in whatis apparently the brutal stabbing, the actual death, ofthe victim. Together they reveal a woman’s preoccupationwith her own body, a narcissism which is concretizedin the last photograph, which is of Claire herself,faceless, caressing her own cunt. This narcissism is aflaw which defines woman, and to atone for it a womanmust, in the glorious tradition of O, consent to andparticipate in her own annihilation. Such is the scenariowhich permits her a Christian salvation, which redeemsher of the sin of Eve and the subsequent sin of her ownself-love. The photographs are “really nothing morethan religious pictures, steps along the way of a newroad to the cross. ” 11 The road, however, is an old one,well traveled, and if the cross is difficult to reach viathis particular road, it is only because the bodies ofmartyrs other than Anne and Claire lie piled so deep.It is only too obvious that the tortured, mutilatedwoman who appears first as Anne, then as the moreimpersonal victim of the photographs, and finallyin a dream of Jean de Berg’s as a dead body “pierced bymany triangular stab wounds in the most propitiousareas” 12 is the secular Christ of cunt and breast, Eve’sfallen, lustful, carnal descendant, the victim who, unlikeJesus, is suffering for her own sins, the criminal whosepunishment scarcely equals the horror of her crime.That crime, of course, is biological womanhood. Jesusdied for us once, the crucifixion he suffered sufficed, we

Woman at Victim: The Image 73are told, for all time. Anne, Claire, O, all will be forcedspread-eagle on the cross until death releases them, andthen again. No cruelty will ever be proper atonementfor their crime, and thus set the rest o f us free.Christianity has one other image o f woman, Mary,the Madonna, the Virgin Mother. Jean de Berg dreamso f Claire as the Madonna shortly before he beats andfucks her. Surely that demonstrates the psychic significance,in a sexist culture, o f the Madonna figure.Just as Anne on the cross was a profanation o f thesacred nature o f women, so is the concept, the Lie,o f a virgin mother, separate from her cunt, separatefrom nature, innocent by virtue o f the abandonmento f her real, and most honorable, sexuality.The worship o f virginity must be posited as a realsexual perversion, crueler and more insidious thanthose sex models condemned by the culture as perverse.The Christian institutionalization o f that worship,its cultivation and refinement, have aborted women inthe development and expression o f natural sexuality bygiving credence to that other: woman as whore. Thedualism o f good and evil, virgin and whore, lily androse, spirit and nature is inherent in Christianity andfinds its logical expression in the rituals o f sadomasochism.The Christian emphasis on pain and sufferingas the path to transcendence and salvation is the verymeat o f most sadomasochistic pornography, just as theChristian definition o f woman is its justification. LennyBruce expressed it very simply when he said this:I understand that intellectually — that a womanwho sleeps with a different guy every week is a better

74 Woman HalingChristian than the virgin. Because she has the capacityto kiss and hug fifty guys a year. And that's what thatact is —kissing and hugging. You can’t do it to anyoneyou’re mad at. If you’re just a bit bugged with them,you can’t make it.So that chick who's got that much love for all herfellowmen that she can make it with fifty guys a year—that’s intellectually; but emotionally, I don’t want tobe the fifty-first guy. Cause I learned my lesson early,man. The people told me, “This is the way it is, Virginis Good, Virgin is Good. ” Yeah, that’s really weird. 13As the most obvious male Christ figure of our time, heshould know.

CHAPTER 5Woman as Victim:SuckWe move from the straight literary pornography o f ourforebears, represented by Story of O and The Image, intoanother realm, that o f the sex newspaper, born o f thehip culture (or, as we like to think, counter-culture),post sex revolution (Freudian, Reichian, Mailerian,Brucean, Ginsbergian), post pot, post acid, post pill:post Them and into the world o f Us. We move into therealm o f here and now, our own turned-on, liberatedtime and space, into the social world for which we areresponsible. Since we seek in that world freedom aswomen, defined in radical terms, achieved through aconcretely lived lifestyle, newspapers like Suck, Oz, andScrew are important. Playboy is Them —no doubt Kissingerand Sinatra sleep with it tucked under the pillow.But the counter-culture sex papers are created bypeople who inhabit our world (freaks, drug users, radicals,longhairs, whatever the appropriate term mightbe), people who share our values, our concerns — peoplewho talk o f liberation. The counter-culture sex paperswould be a part o f our community and so we areobliged, if we are a community, to approach them criticallyand seriously, to ask what they bring to us andwhat they take from us.75

76 Woman Hating“Us” —who are we? Jerry Rubin says that we are theChildren of Amerika. Eldridge Cleaver calls us theChildren of BLOOD. It is our parents, Amerika,BLOOD, who through their moral bankruptcy andgenocidal ways have forced us from the womb onto thestreets of the nation. It is our parents, Amerika,BLOOD, whom we refuse to be, whose work we refuseto do. We are the survivors of Flower Power, now adult,with our own children. We are the tribes of WoodstockNation, now in Diaspora, roaming the whole earth. Weare the New Left, wounded, in disarray. We are notyet extinct, and we are not nearly finished. Our pastis only prologue.Generally we are between 24 and 35 years old; haveused acid, mescaline, psilocibin, etc., with some frequency;use grass and hashish often with no mystification;have probably used cocaine, amphetamines, orbarbiturates at some time; have frequent sexual relations,many of which are absolutely casual; reject thenuclear family and seek forms of community antagonisticto it. We are the people who listened to Leary,Ginsberg, Bruce. Politically we are radicals. Some ofus seek to develop radical forms of community, to livegood, simple, natural lives. Some of us engage in explicitlypolitical actions —opposing illegitimate wars,resisting the uses of illegitimate authority —we wonderhow to kill pigs without becoming pigs, we are immersedin the process of revolution, we learn the skillsof revolution, we resist all forms of current authorityand we simultaneously seek to develop alternatives tothose forms. There are diminishing numbers of peacefreaks among us (totally committed to nonviolent revo-

Woman as Victim: Suck 77lution) and quite a few roaring anarchists. We are, atleast in our Amerikan manifestation, white, childreno f privilege, children o f liberals and reformists. Wewere brought up in pretty, clean homes, had lots o fprivacy, friends, companionship from family and peers.We are unbelievably well educated —we went to finesuburban schools (mostly public) where we experiencedphysical and intellectual regimentation which we foundunbearable; we went to the best colleges and universities(mostly private) where we studied anthropology,Freud, Marx, Norman O. Brown, and Marcuse too,with the finest minds who, it turned out, were chickenshit when it came to applying egalitarian principles inthe classroom or outside o f it. The universities wherewe studied all o f these disembodied ideas continueddoing defense work for the Amerikan government. Wehave had our share o f disaster and despair: the acidtragedies, the Weatherman tragedies, the needle tragedies.Many o f us have known jail, and we have all seenfriends die. We are older than we ever thought wewould be.What it comes down to is this: through the use ofdrugs, through sexual living out, through radical politicalaction, we broke through the bourgeois mentalsets which were our inheritance but retained the humanismcrucial to the liberalism o f our parents. Ourgoals are simple enough to understand: we want tohumanize the planet, to break down the national structureswhich separate us as people, the corporate structureswhich separate us into distinct classes, the raciststructures which separate us according to skin color;to conserve air, water, life in its many forms; to create

78 Woman Hatingcommunities which are more than habitable—communitiesin which people are free, in which people havewhat they need, in which groups of people do not accumulatepower, or money, or goods, through the exploitationof other people. So when we look at a sexnewspaper, made by people like us, we demand thatit take some positive step in the direction we want togo: we demand that it incorporate our radical attitudes,the knowledge that acid and other parts of our lifestylehave given us. And, most importantly, we refuse topermit it to reinforce the dual-role sexist patterns andconsciousness of this culture, the very patterns and consciousnesswhich oppress us as women, which enslaveus as human beings.Suck is a typical counter-culture sex paper. Anyanalysis of it reveals that the sexism is all-pervasive,expressed primarily as sadomasochism, absolutely thesame as, and not counter to, the parent cultural values.Suck claims to be an ally. It is crucial to demonstrate thatit is not.The first issue of Suck appeared in Amsterdam,Holland, in 1969. It continues to be printed in Amsterdambecause Dutch police do not confiscate pornographyor imprison pornographers. It was started bytwo Amerikan expatriates. Suck is entirely about sex,that is, its pages contain pornographic fiction, technicalsexual advice (how to suck cock or cunt, for instance),letters from readers which reveal personal sexual histories(mostly celebrational), and photographs of cunt,cock, fucking, sucking, and group orgying. The newspaperappears irregularly —when there is enough

Woman as Victim: Suck 79money and material for publication. Suck is confiscatedin England and France with some vigor.Suck has made positive contributions. Sucking isapproached in a new way. Sucking cock, sucking cunt,how to, how good. Sperm tastes good, so does cunt. Inparticular, the emphasis on sucking cunt serves todemystify cunt in a spectacular way —cunt is not dirty,not terrifying, not smelly and foul; it is a source o fpleasure, a beautiful part o f female physiology, to beseen, touched, tasted.The taboo against sucking goes very deep. Most ofthe actual laws against cocksucking and cuntsuckingrelate to prohibitions against any sexual activity thatdoes not lead to, or is not performed for the purposeo f effecting, impregnation. Sucking as an act leadingto orgasm places the nature o f sexual contact clearly —sex is the coming together o f people for pleasure. Thevalue is in the coming together. Marriage does notsanctify that coming together, procreation is not itsgoal. Suck treats sucking as an act o f the same magnitudeas fucking. That attitude, pictures o f womensucking cock, men sucking cunt, and all the vice versas,discussions o f the techniques o f sucking, all break downbarriers to the realization o f a full sexuality.Cunnilingus and fellatio (sucking by any other name. . . ) are still crimes. The antifellatio laws, in conjunctionwith sodomy laws, are sometimes used against malehomosexuals (lesbians are not taken seriously enoughto be prosecuted). Given the selective enforcement o fthe laws, the shame that attaches to the forbidden acts,and the fact that acts o f oral lovemaking represented

Woman Hatingin words or in pictures are generally deemed obscene,sucking must be seen in and of itself as an act of politicalsignificance (which is certainly wonderful news for depressedrevolutionaries). In this instance Suck takes arelevant, respectable stand.(Important digression. As late as October 1961,Lenny Bruce was arrested because in one of his routineshe used the verb “to come" and talked about cocksucking.He was arrested for the crime of obscenity.Bruce described the bust:I was arrested for obscenity in San Francisco for usinga ten letter word which is sort of chic. I’m not going torepeat the word tonite. It starts with a “c. ” They saidit was vernacular for a favorite homosexual practice —which is weird, cause I don't relate that word to homosexuals.It relates to any contemporary woman I knowor would know or would love or would marry. 1Bruce was busted in San Francisco (obscenity), Philadelphia(possession), Los Angeles (possession), Hollywood(obscenity), Chicago (obscenity), and not permittedto enter England or Australia. As late as 1964Bruce was busted for obscenity in New York City, in1965 he was declared a legally bankrupt pauper, andon August 3, 1966, he died in Los Angeles. )Suck also makes a contribution in printing picturesof cunt, though here the praise must be severely qualified.Photos of cunt are rare. All the rest we have seen —siliconed tits, leering smiles, Playboy's version of pubichair. But having seen a remarkable movie by AnneSeverson and Shelby Kennedy2in which a fixed cameracatalogues the cunts of many different women, all ages,

Woman as Victim: Suck 81races, with all sorts o f sexual experience, one gets acomprehension o f the superficiality o f the Suck cuntphotos. Imagine a catalogue o f still photos o f people’sfaces —the colors, textures, indentations, the uniquecharacter o f each. It is the same with cunts, and it wouldbe fine if Suck would show us that. It does not.Germaine Greer once wrote for Suck — she was aneditor—and her articles, the token women’s articles,were sometimes strong; her voice was always authentic.Her attempt was to bring women into closer touch withunaltered female sexuality and place that sexualityclearly, unapologetically, within the realm o f humanity:women, not as objects, but as human beings, truly arevolutionary concept.But Greer has another side which allies itself withthe worst o f male chauvinism and it is that side which, Ibelieve, made her articles acceptable to Suck's editorsand Suck acceptable to her. In an interview in the Am erikanScrew, reprinted in Suck under the tide “Germaine:‘I am a Whore, ’ ” she stated:Ideally, you’ve got to the stage where you really couldball everyone —the fat, the blind, the foolish, the impotent,the dishonest.We have to rescue people who are already dead.We have to make love to people who are dead, andthat’s not easy. 3Here is the ever popular notion that women, extendingour role as sex object, can humanize an atrophiedworld. The notion is based on a false premise. Just asthe pill was supposed to liberate women by liberatingus sexually, i. e., we could fuck as freely as men, fucking

82 Woman Hatingis supposed to liberate women and men too. But the pillserved to reinforce our essential bondage —it made usmore accessible, more open to exploitation. It did notchange our basic condition because it did nothing tochallenge the sexist structure of society, not to mentionconventional sexual relationships and couplings. Neitherdoes promiscuity per se. Greer’s alliance with the sexualrevolution is, sadly but implicitly, an alliance with malechauvinism because it does not speak to the basic conditionof women which remains the same if we fuck oneman a week, or twenty.There is similar misunderstanding in this statement:Well, listen, this is one of the things a woman hasto understand, and I get a bit impatient sometimes withwomen who can’t see it. A woman, after all, in thiscountry is a commodity. She’s a status symbol, and theprettier she is the more expensive, the more difficultto attain. Anyone can have a fat old lady. But younggirls with clear eyes are not for the 40-year-old manwho’s been working as a packer or a storeman all hislife. So that when he sees her he snarls, mostly I think,because she’s not available to him. She’s another taunt,and yet another index of how the American dream isnot his to have. He never had a girl like that and henever will.Now, I think that the most sensible way for us tosee the crime of rape is an act of aggression againstthis property symbol. . . (but I’m not sure aboutthis at all —I mean, I think it’s also aggression againstthe mother who fucks up so many people’s lives). AndI must think that as a woman, who has not done arevolution, have not put myself on the barricade onthis question, I owe it to my poor brothers not to getuptight. Because I am that, I am a woman they could

Woman as Victim: Suck 83never hope to ball, and in the back o f my mind I rejectthem too. 4Here again, the alliance is with male chauvinism, and itis incomprehensible. Mothers fuck up people’s lives indirect proportion to how fucked up their own lives are— that fuck up is the role they must play, the creativepossibilities they must abort. Greer surely knows thatand must speak to it. Women who walk, as opposed tothose who take taxis or drive (another relevant classdistinction), are constantly harassed, often threatenedwith violence, often violated. That is the situation whichis the daily life o f women.It is true, and very much to the point, that womenare objects, commodities, some deemed more expensivethan others —but it is only by asserting one’s humannessevery time, in all situations, that one becomes someoneas opposed to something. That, after all, is the core o four struggle.Rape, o f course, does have its apologists. NormanMailer posits it, along with murder, as the content ofheroism. It is, he tells us in The Presidential Papers,morally superior to masturbation. Eldridge Cleavertells us that it is an act o f political rebellion — he “practiced”on Black women so that he could rape whitewomen better. Greer joins the mystifying chorus whenshe posits rape as an act o f aggression against property(a political anticapitalist action no less) and suggeststhat it might also be an act o f psychological rebellionagainst the ominous, and omnipresent, mother. * Rape* Greer changed her ideas on rape. Cf. Germaine Greer, “Seduction Is aFour-Letter W ord, ” Playboy, vol. 20, no. 1 (January 1973).

84 Woman Hatingis, in fact, simple straightforward heterosexual behaviorin a male-dominated society. It offends us when it does,which is rarely, only because it is male-female relationwithout sham —without the mystifying romance of thecouple, without the civility of a money exchange. Ithappens in the home as well as on the streets. It is nota function of capitalism — it is a function of sexism.What Greer contributes to Suck, and to its womenreaders who might look to her for cogent analysis anddeep imagination, is mostly confusion. That confusionstems from an identification with men which too oftenblunts her perception of the real, empirical problemswomen face in a sexist society. That confusion manifestsitself most destructively in the patently untrue notionthat a woman who fucks freely is free.The main body of Suck is pornographic fiction. It isin the fiction that we find a repetition of events, situations,images, and attitudes which most effectively reinforceconventional sexist values. “Congo CrystalHotel, ” a story by Mel Clay, is typical of Suck fiction.Two men watch a pornographic movie. They have asadistic sexual encounter. One of the men, Beno, goesoff to meet Carol, a woman he has known previously.He forces her to fuck and suck two Blacks, who violateher in every way. Carol’s husband intrudes. Beno forcesCarol to suck her husband’s cock and as her husbandcomes, Beno shoots him. An example of the purpleprose:In a sudden spasm the man clutches her head andarches his back and as the beginning sensations oforgasm overtake him Beno pulls the trigger, the explosiondrowning out the sound of Carol gulping onhis come and his brains splashing against the ceiling. 5

Woman as Victim: Suck 85Carol is announced: “he could smell her even before hesaw her. ” 6 The rape which Beno forces on her is, o fcourse, the vehicle o f her recognition that she loveshim, because only he could do that to her. The storycontains incredible violence. Beno whips his male lover,Carol is beaten and raped, the husband is killed. Thecocks o f the Blacks are, o f course, gigantic tools o f pleasureand pain. There is little to distinguish “CongoCrystal Hotel” from straight pornography, except forthe awful quality o f the writing. The vision o f woman isprecisely the same: insatiable cunt, to be violated andabused; the sadomasochistic content is the same; eventhe exaggerated genitalia o f the Blacks participate inthe worst o f the pornographic tradition.“Sex Angels, ” a story by Ron Reid, chronicles the adventureso f Helen and Tony, that is, a gangbang arrangedby Helen with a bunch o f tough bikers. Helenis “high class cunt who was soon to be stuffed with theirworking class cocks. ” 7 The class analysis is central to thestory: “the social gulf accentuated the mounting thrillalready high with the knowledge that the young husbandwas to observe his wife’s gangbanging by thepack. ” 8 The culmination o f the event, after Helen hasbeen thoroughly used, is described like this:now hot wet fuck tube —hot slit, go on let see you fuckyour wife now. we’ve all been through her. 9Helen, whose resemblance to that other well-known sexobject, Helen o f Troy, will not be overlooked by theacute observer, is a “hot wet fuck tube —hot slit. ” Indeed,one must ask, in the world o f Suck fiction, who ofus is not?

Woman HatingThe overwhelming fact which emerges about Suckfiction is that it contains and expresses the traditionalmale fantasies about women. Helen and Carol differlittle from O and Claire. Their needs can be articulatedin precisely the same way: cock, lots of it, all of the time,rape, violation, cruelty. If only our needs were so simple.If only our needs had anything to do with it at all.Men have always known, in that existential-according-to-Mailerway, that women not only need IT butwant IT, rape-brand-whip orchestrated. It was alwaysobvious to them —a woman's “virtue” is merely facade,her reluctance is merely tactic. What matters is that shewants to be fucked —she is defined by her need to befucked. We find in Suck these sacrosanct male fantasiesapplied with true counter-culture egalitarianism: toall beings “feminine, ” whether women or gay men.Projection has come home to roost and cock is crowinglike never before —but, like the cult of cunt before it,the cult of cock is colored with the washes of unresolvedguilt and pure sadism. The onus and hatred of malehomosexuality is heavy in Suck — ugly, heavy, and everpresent.Suck has in some ways aligned itself with the causeof gay liberation. Suck 4 printed the “Gay Guide toEurope, ” a list of gay clubs, bars, pissoirs, etc., to alleviatethe chronic need for information felt by thetraveling gay man. Suck 6 has a story entitled “A Weekin the Fondle Park, ” in which a man extols the quantityof cock sucked in one idyllic week in Amsterdam’scentral park, which had been turned over to longhaireddopers and freaks in the summer of 1971. Butin Suck, as in the parent culture which maligns any

Woman as Victim: Suck 87deviation from the ole hetero norm, the hatred attachedto the queer is very apparent.“The Suction Game” is the story o f two men, onedark-skinned, one light-skinned, one overt, one latent —a typical colonial situation, ripe for exploitation. Theacknowledged (overt) queer has the typical misogynistpoint o f view:Carlos explained that the male body was nature’sperfection and how clean men were compared towomen. 10T o the norm ally) self-enhancing John Wayne male, theabove is self-evident and always has been. In the contexto f the homosexual encounter it has added significance.It reinforces the maleness o f both partners. Itmakes the homosexual act an affirmation o f manhood.The insecurities which a homosexual identity conjuresup in our culture, however, are hardly resolved throughthe putting down o f women. “Cocksucker” is a term o finsult and abuse —it means queer. Yet it is obviouslyabsurd for a man to believe that what is pleasurable tohim when done by a woman is disgusting when done bya man. The distinction here is not so very subtle: thepolitical meaning o f the two acts, heterosexual fellatioand homosexual fellatio, is different. The former makesthe man clearly the master —the woman kneels at thefoot o f the sheikh. The latter makes the man queer—ours is not to reason why, or is it?Carlos (overt, dark-skinned), having unzipped thehero’s pants, has started kissing his glorious equipment:

Woman HatingHere I was standing in this tiny YMCA room, naked asthe day I was born, with a pretty boy queer, kneelingin front of me playing with my cock. The whole thingwas sickening, but the worst part was that I was enjoyingit.. . . Suddenly I didn’t give a fuck if he wasqueer. I just relaxed and surrendered to his suckingmouth. 11The resultant orgasm is fantastic, mind-blowing, asaren’t they all in Suck. Yet the imminent slander is toomuch to bear. Being sucked by a queer is one thing.Reciprocity is something else. Could it be reciprocitythat makes one queer?He was a fucking queer but I wasn’t. If he had hotrock that was his problem not mine. He’ll just have tofind some other queer to suck his cock. 12Hot Rock Carlos is undaunted. After much patientpersistance, our supermale hero succumbs, with reservations:“The idea was repulsive to me, but I wantedto make him happy. ” 13 The moral of the tale is simple.Says our hero:Funny I do not consider myself queer, just damn luckyto be able to attract so many good looking young boysso they could have their rock inside me. 14Only now does the definitive definition of queer seemto emerge. Cocksucking isn’t the definitive experienceafter all. One must conclude that anal intercourse,the closest corollary to female penetration, really definesthe queer. One must conclude that being fuckedin the ass separates the queers from the men and places

Woman as Victim: Suck 89them squarely among the women. One must concludethat being penetrated is queer, not to mention debasing,disgusting, and humiliating, which one had alreadyguessed.Homosexual men are not only penetrated likewomen —they also lust after pain and degradation. Theauthor o f “The Suction Game” has given us anotherexample o f homosexual pornography, this one engaginglyentided “Tough Young Dicks for Hot Kicks. ”Five young toughs are cruising; they pick up a longhairedboy, shove him in the back seat o f the car and orderhim to blow them all; the boy considers refusing,since he’d love to be beaten then and there, but insteadsubmits since greater abuse can always be hadthrough submission than through resistance; the youngtoughs brutally rape the long-haired boy, then piss andshit all over him. He is, o f course, ecstatic:Gee did I smell o f come and teenage sweat and urineand I had two more toss-offs myself thinking abouttheir tough young faces and dicks enjoying me forhot kicks. 15The stereotype o f the homosexual which emergesfrom the general run o f Suck fiction is not very differentfrom the stereotype o f woman. The homosexual isqueer, asshole, cocksucker, faggot; the woman is hole,hot wet fuck tube, hot slit, or just plain ass. He thriveson pain and so does she. Gangbanging is their mutualjoy. Huge, throbbing, monster, atom-smashing cock isgod and master to them both. The parts they play in thesadomasochistic script are the same: so are costumes,attitudes, and other conventional cultural baggage. It

90 Woman Halingis not hard to see that the struggle for gay male liberationand women’s liberation is a common struggle:both mean freedom from the stigma of being female.The fantasies (indicative of structural mental sets) whichoppress male homosexuals and women are very muchalike. Women and male homosexuals are united intheir queerness, a union which is real and verifiable —affirmed by Suck, which contributes to the culturaloppression of both.The pages of Suck have, sadly, nothing to do withsexual liberation — there is no “counter” to the cultureto be found anywhere in them. They are, instead,a catalogue of exactly those sexist fantasies whichexpress our most morbid psychic sets. They chart thelandscape of repression, a landscape that is surprisinglyfamiliar. As women, we find that we are where we havealways been: the necessary victim, there we are, thevictim again; the eternal object, there we are, the objectagain. Through the projection of archetypal sadomasochisticimages, which are the staple of the sexistmentality, we become more a prisoner, robbed andcheated of any real experience or authentic communication,thrown back into the intricate confusion of beingwomen in search of a usable identity.

Part ThreeTHE HERSTORYWe are a feelingless people. If we couldreally feel, the pain would be so great thatwe would stop all the suffering. If we couldfeel that one person every six seconds diesof starvation (and as this is happening, thiswriting, this reading, someone is dying ofstarvation) we would stop it. If we couldreally feel it in the bowels, the groin, inthe throat, in the breast, we would go intothe streets and stop the war, stop slavery,stop the prisons, stop the killings, stopdestruction. Ah, I might learn what love is.When we feel, we will feel the emergency:when we feel the emergency, wewill act: when we act, we will change theworld.Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

The rapes, tortures, and violations o f O, Claire, Anne,Suck's Helen, et al., are fiction, documenting the twistedlandscape o f male wish-fulfillment. Here we have herstory,the underbelly of history, two acts o f gynocidecommitted against women by men, their scope and substancelargely ignored. One is not surprised to find thatthey document that same twisted landscape.I isolate in particular Chinese footbinding and thepersecution o f the witches because they are crimeswhich equal in sheer horror and sadism the exterminationo f Native Americans and Hitler’s massacre o f theJews. Those two horrendous slaughters have found aplace, however tenuous, in the “conscience” o f “man. ”Acts of genocide against women have barely been noticed,and they have never evoked rage, or horror, orsorrow. That sexist hatred equals racist hatred in itsintensity, irrationality, and contempt for the sanctityof human life these two examples clearly demonstrate.That women have not been exterminated, and will notbe (at least until the technology o f creating life in thelaboratory is perfected) can be attributed to our presumedability to bear children and, more importantly93

94 Woman Hatingno doubt, to the relative truth that men prefer to fuckcunts who are nominally alive. I except here necrophiliacs,those pure and unsullied princes, whose story beginswhere ours ends.In addition, in any war, in any violence betweentribes or nations, a specific war crime is perpetratedagainst women —that of rape. Every woman rapedduring a political nation-state war is the victim of amuch larger war, planetary in its dimensions —the war,more declared than we can bear to know, that men wageagainst women. That war had its most gruesome, grotesqueexpression when Chinese men bound the feetof Chinese women and when British, Welsh, Irish,Scottish, German, Dutch, French, Swiss, Italian, Spanish,and Amerikan men had women burned at the stake inthe name of God the Father and His only Son.

FOOTBINDING EVENTInstructions Before Reading Chapter1. Find a piece o f cloth 10 feet long and 2 inches wide2. Find a pair o f children’s shoes3. Bend all toes except the big one under and into thesole o f the foot. Wrap the cloth around these toesand then around the heel. Bring the heel and toes asclose together as possible. Wrap the full length o fthe cloth as tightly as possible4. Squeeze foot into children’s shoes5. Walk6. Imagine that you are 5 years old7. Imagine being like this for the rest o f your lifeCHAPTER 6Gynocide: Chinese FootbindingThe origins of Chinese footbinding, as o f Chinesethought in general, belong to that amorphous entitycalled antiquity. The 10th century marks the beginningo f the physical, intellectual, and spiritual dehumanizationo f women in China through the institutiono f footbinding. That institution itself, the implicit beliefin its necessity and beauty, and the rigor with which itwas practiced lasted another 10 centuries. There weresporadic attempts at emancipating the foot —someartists, intellectuals, and women in positions o f powerwere the proverbial drop in the bucket. Those attempts,modest though they were, were doomed to failure:95

96 Woman Hatingfootbinding was a political institution which reflectedand perpetuated the sociological and psychological inferiorityof women; footbinding cemented women to acertain sphere, with a certain function —women weresexual objects and breeders. Footbinding was massattitude, mass culture —it was the key reality in a wayof life lived by real women— 10 centuries times thatmany millions o f them.It is generally thought that footbinding originated asan innovation among the dancers of the Imperialharem. Sometime between the 9th and 11th centuries,Emperor Li Yu ordered a favorite ballerina to achievethe “pointed look. ” The fairy tale reads like this:Li Yu had a favored palace concubine namedLovely Maiden who was a slender-waisted beauty anda gifted dancer. He had a six-foot high lotus constructedfor her out of gold; it was decorated lavishlywith pearls and had a carmine lotus carpet in thecenter. Lovely Maiden was ordered to bind her feetwith white silk cloth to make the tips look like thepoints of a moon sickle. She then danced in the centerof the lotus, whirling about like a rising cloud. 1From this original event, the bound foot received theeuphemism “Golden Lotus, ” though it is clear thatLovely Maiden’s feet were bound loosely— she could stilldance.A later essayist, a true foot gourmand, described 58varieties of the human lotus, each one graded on a 9-point scale. For example:T ype: Lotus petal, New moon, Harmonious bow,Bamboo shoot, Water chestnutSpecifications: plumpness, softness, fineness

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding 97Rank:Divine Quality (A-1), perfectly plump, soft and fineWondrous Quality (A-2), weak and slenderImmortal Quality (A-3), straight-boned, independentPrecious Article (B-1), peacocklike, too wide, disproportionedPure Article (B-2), gooselike, too long and thinSeductive Article (B-3), fleshy, short, wide, round(the disadvantage of this foot was that its ownercould withstand a blowing wind)Excessive Article (C-1), narrow but insufficientlypointedOrdinary Article (C-2), plump and commonFalse Article (C-3), monkeylike large heel (couldclimb)The distinctions only emphasize that footbindingwas a rather hazardous operation. T o break the bonesinvolved or to modify the pressure o f the bindings irregularlyhad embarrassing consequences — no girlcould bear the ridicule involved in being called a “largefootedDemon” and the shame o f being unable to marry.Even the possessor o f an A -1 Golden Lotus couldnot rest on her laurels —she had to observe scrupulouslythe taboo-ridden etiquette o f bound femininity: (1) donot walk with toes pointed upwards; (2) do not standwith heels seemingly suspended in midair; (3) do notmove skirt when sitting; (4) do not move feet whenlying down. The same essayist concludes his treatisewith this most sensible advice (directed to the gentlemeno f course):Do not remove the bindings to look at her bare feet,but be satisfied with its external appearance. Enjoy the

98 Woman Hatingoutward impression, for if you remove the shoes andbindings the aesthetic feeling will be destroyed forever.2Indeed. The real feet looked like this:(feet: 3 to 4 inches in length)The physical process which created this foot isdescribed by Howard S. Levy in Chinese Footbinding:The History of a Curious Erotic Custom:The success or failure of footbinding depended onskillful application of a bandage around each foot. Thebandage, about two inches wide and ten feet long, was

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding 99wrapped in the following way. One end was placed onthe inside of the instep, and from there it was carriedover the small toes so as to force the toes in and towardsthe sole. The large toe was left unbound. Thebandage was then wrapped around the heel so forcefullythat heel and toes were drawn closer together.The process was then repeated from the beginninguntil the entire bandage had been applied. The foot ofthe young child was subjected to a coercive and unremittingpressure, for the object was not merely toconfine the foot but to make the toes bend under andinto the sole and bring the heel and sole as close togetheras physically possible. 3A C hristian m issionary observed:The flesh often became putrescent during the bindingand portions sloughed off from the sole; sometimesone or more toes dropped off. 4A n e ld e rly Chinese w om an, as late as 1934, re m e m ­bered v ivid ly h e r c h ild h o o d experience:Born into an old-fashioned family at P’ing-hsi, I wasinflicted with the pain of footbinding when I was sevenyears old. I was an active child who liked to jump about,but from then on my free and optimistic nature vanished.Elder Sister endured the process from six toeight years of age [this means that it took Elder Sistertwo years to attain the 3-inch foot]. It was in thefirst lunar month of my seventh year that my ears werepierced and fitted with gold earrings. I was told that agirl had to suffer twice, through ear piercing and footbinding.Binding started in the second lunar month;mother consulted references in order to select anauspicious day for it. I wept and hid in a neighbor’s

100 Woman Hatinghome, but Mother found me, scolded me, and draggedme home. She shut the bedroom door, boiled water,and from a box withdrew binding, shoes, knife, needle,and thread. I begged for a one-day postponement, butMother refused: “Today is a lucky day, ” she said. “Ifbound today, your feet will never hurt; if bound tomorrowthey will. ” She washed and placed alum on myfeet and cut the toenails. She then bent my toes towardthe plantar with a binding cloth ten feet long and twoinches wide, doing the right foot first and then theleft. She finished binding and ordered me to walk,but when I did the pain proved unbearable.That night, Mother wouldn’t let me remove theshoes. My feet felt on fire and I couldn’t sleep; Motherstruck me for crying. On the following days, I triedto hide but was forced to walk on my feet. Mother hitme on my hands and feet for resisting. Beatings andcurses were my lot for covertly loosening the wrappings.The feet were washed and rebound after threeor four days, with alum added. After several months,all toes but the big one were pressed against the innersurface. Whenever I ate f ish or freshly killed meat,my feet would swell, and the pus would drip. Mothercriticized me for placing pressure on the heel in walking,saying that my feet would never assume a prettyshape. Mother would remove the bindings and wipethe blood and pus which dripped from my feet. Shetold me that only with the removal of the flesh couldmy feet become slender. If I mistakenly punctured asore, the blood gushed like a stream. My somewhatfleshy big toes were bound with small pieces of cloth andforced upwards, to assume a new moon shape.Every two weeks, I changed to new shoes. Eachnew pair was one- to two-tenths of an inch smaller thanthe previous one. The shoes were unyielding, and ittook pressure to get into them. Though I wanted tosit passively by the K’ang, Mother forced me to move

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding 101around. After changing more than ten pairs of shoes,my feet were reduced to a little over four inches. Ihad been in binding for a month when my youngersister started; when no one was around, we wouldweep together. In summer, my feet smelled offensivelybecause of pus and blood; in winter, my feetfelt cold because of lack of circulation and hurt ifthey got too near the K'ang and were struck by warmair currents. Four of the toes were curled in like somany dead caterpillars; no outsider would ever havebelieved that they belonged to a human being. It tooktwo years to achieve the three-inch model. My toenailspressed against the flesh like thin paper. Theheavily-creased plantar couldn't be scratched when ititched or soothed when it ached. My shanks were thin,my feet became humped, ugly, and odiferous; how Ienvied the natural-footed! 5Bound feet were crippled and excruciatingly painful.The woman was actually “walking” on the outsideo f toes which had been bent under into the sole o f thefoot. The heel and instep o f the foot resembled the soleand heel o f a high-heeled boot. Hard callouses formed;toenails grew into the skin; the feet were pus-filled andbloody; circulation was virtually stopped. The footboundwoman hobbled along, leaning on a cane, againsta wall, against a servant. T o keep her balance she tookvery short steps. She was actually falling with everystep and catching herself with the next. Walking requiredtremendous exertion.Footbinding also distorted the natural lines o f thefemale body. It caused the thighs and buttocks, whichwere always in a state o f tension, to become somewhatswollen (which men called “voluptuous”). A cu­

102 Woman Halingrious belief developed among Chinese men that footbindingproduced a most useful alteration of thevagina. A Chinese diplomat explained:The smaller the woman’s foot, the more wondrousbecome the folds of the vagina. (There was the saying:the smaller the feet, the more intense the sexurge. ) Therefore marriages in Ta-t’ung (where bindingis most effective) often take place earlier than elsewhere.Women in other districts can produce thesefolds artificially, but the only way is by footbinding,which concentrates development in this one place.There consequendy develop layer after layer (of foldswithin the vagina); those who have personally experiencedthis (in sexual intercourse) feel a supernaturalexaltation. So the system of footbinding wasnot really oppressive. 6Medical authorities confirm that physiologically footbindinghad no effect whatsoever on the vagina, althoughit did distort the direction of the pelvis. Thebelief in the wondrous folds of the vagina of footboundwoman was pure mass delusion, a projection of lustonto the feet, buttocks, and vagina of the crippledfemale. Needless to say, the diplomat’s rationale forfinding footbinding “not really oppressive” confusedhis “supernatural exaltation” with her misery andmutilation.Bound feet, the same myth continues, “made thebuttocks more sensual, [and] concentrated life-givingvapors on the upper part of the body, making the facemore attractive. ” 7 If, due to a breakdown in the flowof these “life-giving vapors, ” an ugly woman was footboundand still ugly, she need not despair, for an A-1

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding 103Golden Lotus could compensate for a C-3 face andfigure.But to return to herstory, how did our Chineseballerina become the millions o f women stretched over10 centuries? The transition from palace dancer to populationat large can be seen as part o f a class dynamic.The emperor sets the style, the nobility copies it, andthe lower classes climbing ever upward do their bestto emulate it. The upper class bound the feet o f theirladies with the utmost severity. The Lady, unable towalk, remained properly invisible in her boudoir, anornament, weak and small, a testimony to the wealthand privilege of the man who could afford to keep h er—to keep her idle. Doing no manual labor, she did not needher feet either. Only on the rarest o f occasions was sheallowed outside o f the incarcerating walls o f her home,and then only in a sedan chair behind heavy curtains.The lower a woman’s class, the less could such idlenessbe supported: the larger the feet. The women who hadto work for the economic survival o f the family stillhad bound feet, but the bindings were looser, the feetbigger—after all, she had to be able to walk, even ifslowly and with little balance.Footbinding was a visible brand. Footbinding didnot emphasize the differences between men and women —itcreated them, and they were then perpetuated in thename o f morality. Footbinding functioned as the Cerberuso f morality and ensured female chastity in anation of women who literally could not “run around. ”Fidelity, and the legitimacy o f children, could be reckonedon.The minds o f footbound women were as contracted

104 Woman Hatingas their feet. Daughters were taught to cook, supervisethe household, and embroider shoes for the GoldenLotus. Intellectual and physical restriction had the usualmale justification. Women were perverse and sinful,lewd and lascivious, if left to develop naturally. TheChinese believed that being bom a woman was paymentfor evils committed in a previous life. Footbinding wasdesigned to spare a woman the disaster of another suchincarnation.Marriage and the family are the twin pillars of allpatriarchal cultures. Bound feet, in China, were thetwin pillars of these twin pillars. Here we have the joiningtogether of politics and morality, coupled to producetheir inevitable offspring—the oppression ofwomen based on totalitarian standards of beauty and arampant sexual fascism. In arranging a marriage, amale's parents inquired first about the prospectivebride’s feet, then about her face. Those were her human,recognizable qualities. During the process of footbinding,mothers consoled their daughters by conjuringup the luscious marriage possibilities dependent onthe beauty of the bound foot. Concubines for the Imperialharem were selected at tiny-foot festivals (forerunnersof Miss America pageants). Rows upon rowsof women sat on benches with their feet outstretchedwhile audience and judges went along the aisles andcommented on the size, shape, and decoration of footand shoes. No one, however, was ever allowed to touchthe merchandise. Women looked forward to thesefestivals, since they were allowed out of the house.The sexual aesthetics, literally the art of love, of

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding 105the bound foot was complex. The sexual attraction o fthe foot was based on its concealment and the mysterysurrounding its development and care. The bindingswere unwrapped and the feet were washed in thewoman’s boudoir, in the strictest privacy. The frequencyo f bathing varied from once a week to once ayear. Perfumes o f various fragrances and alum wereused during and after washing, and various kinds o fsurgery were performed on the callouses and nails.The physical process o f washing helped restore circulation.The mummy was unwrapped, touched up, and putback to sleep with more preservatives added. The resto f the body was never washed at the same time as thefeet, for fear that one would become a pig in the nextlife. Well-bred women were supposed to die o f shameif men observed them washing their feet. The footconsisted, after all, o f smelly, rotted flesh. This wasnaturally not pleasing to the intruding male, a violationo f his aesthetic sensibility.The art o f the shoes was basic to the sexual aestheticso f the bound foot. Untold hours, days, monthswent into the embroidery o f shoes. There were shoesfor all occasions, shoes o f different colors, shoes tohobble in, shoes to go to bed in, shoes for specialoccasions like birthdays, marriages, funerals, shoeswhich denoted age. Red was the favored color for bedshoes because it accentuated the whiteness o f the skinof the calves and thighs. A marriageable daughter madeabout 12 pairs o f shoes as a part o f her dowry. Shepresented 2 specially made pairs to her mother-in-lawand father-in-law. When she entered her husband’s

106 Woman Halinghome for the first time, her feet were immediatelyexamined by the whole family, neither praise norsarcasm being withheld.There was also the art of the gait, the art of sitting,the art of standing, the art of lying down, the art of adjustingthe skirt, the art of every movement whichinvolves feet. Beauty was the way feet looked and howthey moved. Certain feet were better than other feet,more beautiful. Perfect 3-inch form and utter uselessnesswere the distinguishing marks of the aristocraticfoot. These concepts of beauty and status definedwomen: as ornaments, as sexual playthings, as sexualconstructs. The perfect construct, even in China, wasnaturally the prostitute.The natural-footed woman generated horror andrepulsion in China. She was anathema, and all theforces of insult and contempt were used to obliterateher. Men said about bound feet and natural feet:A tiny foot is proof of feminine goodness.. . .Women who don’t bind their feet, look like men,for the tiny foot serves to show the differentiation.. . .The tiny foot is soft and, when rubbed, leads togreat excitement.. . .The graceful walk gives the beholder mixed feelingsof compassion and pity.. . .Natural feet are heavy and ponderous as they getinto bed, but tiny feet lightly steal under the coverlets... .The large-footed woman is careless about adornment,but the tiny-footed frequently wash and applya variety of perfumed fragrances, enchanting all whocome into their presence.. . .

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding 107The natural foot looks much less aesthetic in walking.. . .Everyone welcomes the tiny foot, regarding itssmallness as precious.. . .Men formerly so craved it that its possessorachieved harmonious matrimony.. . .Because o f its diminutiveness, it gives rise to avariety o f sensual pleasures and love feelings.. . . 8Thin, small, curved, soft, fragrant, weak, easilyinflamed, passive to the point of being almost inanimate—thiswas footbound woman. Her bindings createdextraordinary vaginal folds; isolation in the bedroomincreased her sexual desire; playing with theshriveled, crippled foot increased everyone’s desire.Even the imagery o f the names of various types o f footsuggest, on the one hand, feminine passivity (lotuses,lilies, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts) and, on the otherhand, male independence, strength, and mobility (lotusboats, large-footed crows, monkey foot). It was unacceptablefor a woman to have those male qualities denotedby large feet. This fact conjures up an earlierassertion: footbinding did not formalize existing differencesbetween men and women —it created them.One sex became male by virtue of having made theother sex some thing, something other, somethingcompletely polar to itself, something called female.In 1915, a satirical essay in defense o f footbinding,written by a Chinese male, emphasized this:The bound foot is the condition o f a life o f dignityfor man, o f contentment for woman. Let me make thisclear. I am a Chinese fairly typical o f my class. I pored

108 Woman Hatingtoo much over classic texts in my youth and dimmedmy eyes, narrowed my chest, crooked my back. Mymemory is not strong, and in an old civilization thereis a vast deal to learn before you can know anything.Accordingly among scholars I cut a poor figure. I amtimid, and my voice plays me false in gatherings ofmen. But to my footbound wife, confined for life toher house except when I bear her in my arms to herpalanquin, my stride is heroic, my voice is that of aroaring lion, my wisdom is of the sages. To her I amthe world; I am life itself. 9Chinese men, it is clear, stood tall and strong onwomen’s tiny feet.The so-called art of footbinding was the process oftaking the human foot, using it as though it were insensiblematter, molding it into an inhuman form. Footbindingwas the “art” of making living matter insensible,inanimate. We are obviously not dealing here withart at all, but with fetishism, with sexual psychosis. Thisfetish became the primary content of sexual experiencefor an entire culture for 1,000 years. The manipulationof the tiny foot was an indispensable prelude to allsexual experience. Manuals were written elaboratingvarious techniques for holding and rubbing the GoldenLotus. Smelling the feet, chewing them, licking them,sucking them, all were sexually charged experiences.A woman with tiny feet was supposedly more easilymaneuvered around in bed and this was no small advantage.Theft of shoes was commonplace. Womenwere forced to sew their shoes directly onto their bindings.Stolen shoes might be returned soaked in semen.Prostitutes would show their naked feet for a high

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding 109price (there weren’t many streetwalkers in China).Drinking games using cups placed in the shoes o f prostitutesor courtesans were favorite pastimes. Tinyfootedprostitutes took special names like Moon Immortal,Red Treasure, Golden Pearl. No less numerouswere the euphemisms for feet, shoes, and bindings.Some men went to prostitutes to wash the tiny foot andeat its dirt, or to drink tea made from the washingwater. Others wanted their penises manipulated by thefeet. Superstition also had its place —there was a beliefin the curative powers o f the water in which tiny feetwere washed.Lastly, footbinding was the soil in which sadismcould grow and go unchecked —in which simple crueltycould transcend itself, without much effort, intoatrocity. These are some typical horror stories o f thosetimes:A stepmother or aunt in binding the child’s footwas usually much harsher than the natural motherwould have been. An old man was described who delightedin seeing his daughters weep as the bindingwas tightly applied.. . . In one household, everyonehad to bind. The main wife and concubines bound tothe smallest degree, once morning and evening, andonce before retiring. The husband and first wifestrictly carried out foot inspections and whipped thoseguilty o f having let the binding become loose. Thesleeping shoes were so painfully small that the womenhad to ask the master to rub them in order to bringrelief. Another rich man would flog his concubineson their tiny feet, one after another, until the bloodflowed. 10

110 Woman Hating. . . about 1 9 3 1 ... bound-foot women unable to Beehad been taken captive. The bandits, angered becauseof their captives’ weak way of walking and inability tokeep in file, forced the women to remove the bindingsand socks and run about barefoot. They cried out inpain and were unable to move on in spite of beatings.Each of the bandits grabbed a woman and forced herto dance about on a wide field covered with sharprocks. The harshest treatment was meted out to prostitutes.Nails were driven through their hands andfeet; they cried aloud for several days before expiring.One form of torture was to tie-up a woman so that herlegs dangled in midair and place bricks around eachtoe, increasing the weight until the toes straightenedout and eventually dropped off. 11END OF FOOTBINDING EVENTOne asks the same questions again and again, overa period of years, in the course of a lifetime. The questionshave to do with people and what they do —the howand the why of it. How could the Germans have murdered6, 000, 000 Jews, used their skins for lampshades,taken the gold out of their teeth? How could whitepeople have bought and sold black people, hangedthem and castrated them? How could “Americans”have slaughtered the Indian nations, stolen the land,spread famine and disease? How can the Indochinagenocide continue, day after day, year after year?How is it possible? Why does it happen?As a woman, one is forced to ask another series ofhard questions: Why everywhere the oppression ofwomen throughout recorded history? How could the

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding 111Inquisitors torture and bum women as witches? Howcould men idealize the bound feet o f crippled women?How and why?The bound foot existed for 1, 000 years. In whatterms, using what measure, could one calculate theenormity o f the crime, the dimensions o f the transgression,the amount o f cruelty and pain inherent inthat 1, 000-year herstory? In what terms, using whatvocabulary, could one penetrate to the meaning, to thereality, o f that 1, 000-year herstory?Here one race did not war with another to acquirefood, or land, or civil power; one nation did not fightwith another in the interest o f survival, real or imagined;one group o f people in a fever pitch o f hysteriadid not destroy another. None o f the traditional explanationsor justifications for brutality between oramong peoples applies to this situation. On the contrary,here one sex mutilated (enslaved) the other in theinterest o f the art o f sex, male-female harmony, roledefinition,beauty.Consider the magnitude o f the crime.Millions o f women, over a period o f 1,000 years,were brutally crippled, mutilated, in the name oferotica.Millions o f human beings, over a period o f 1, 000years, were brutally crippled, mutilated, in the nameof beauty.Millions o f men, over a period o f 1, 000 years,reveled in love-making devoted to the worship o f thebound foot.Millions o f men, over a period o f 1, 000 years, worshipedand adored the bound foot.

112 Woman HatingMillions of mothers, over a period of 1, 000 years,brutally crippled and mutilated their daughters for thesake of a secure marriage.Millions of mothers, over a period of 1, 000 years,brutally crippled and mutilated their daughters in thename of beauty.But this thousand-year period is only the tip ofan awesome, fearful iceberg: an extreme and visibleexpression of romantic attitudes, processes, andvalues organically rooted in all cultures, then andnow. It demonstrates that man’s love for woman, hissexual adoration of her, his human definition of her,his delight and pleasure in her, require her negation:physical crippling and psychological lobotomy. That isthe very nature of romantic love, which is the love basedon polar role definitions, manifest in herstory as wellas in fiction —he glories in her agony, he adores herdeformity, he annihilates her freedom, he will have heras sex object, even if he must destroy the bones in herfeet to do it. Brutality, sadism, and oppression emergeas the substantive core of the romantic ethos. That ethosis the warp and woof of culture as we know it.Women should be beautiful. All repositories ofcultural wisdom from King Solomon to King Hefneragree: women should be beautiful. It is the reverencefor female beauty which informs the romantic ethos,gives it its energy and justification. Beauty is transformedinto that golden ideal, Beauty —rapturous andabstract. Women must be beautiful and Woman isBeauty.Notions of beauty always incorporate the whole of a

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding 113given societal structure, are crystallizations o f its values.A society with a well-defined aristocracy will have aristocraticstandards o f beauty. In Western “democracy”notions o f beauty are “democratic” : even if a woman isnot born beautiful, she can make herself attractive.The argument is not simply that some women arenot beautiful, therefore it is not fair to judge women onthe basis o f physical beauty; or that men are not judgedon that basis, therefore women also should not bejudged on that basis; or that men should look for characterin women; or that our standards o f beauty aretoo parochial in and o f themselves; or even that judgingwomen according to their conformity to a standard o fbeauty serves to make them into products, chattels,differing from the farmer's favorite cow only in terms ofliteral form. The issue at stake is different, and crucial.Standards o f beauty describe in precise terms the relationshipthat an individual will have to her own body.They prescribe her mobility, spontaneity, posture,gait, the uses to which she can put her body. They defineprecisely the dimensions of her physical freedom. And, o fcourse, the relationship between physical freedom andpsychological development, intellectual possibility, andcreative potential is an umbilical one.In our culture, not one part o f a woman’s body isleft untouched, unaltered. No feature or extremity isspared the art, or pain, o f improvement. Hair is dyed,lacquered, straightened, permanented; eyebrows areplucked, penciled, dyed; eyes are lined, mascaraed,shadowed; lashes are curled, or false —from head totoe, every feature o f a woman's face, every section o fher body, is subject to modification, alteration. This al­

114 Woman Hatingteration is an ongoing, repetitive process. It is vital tothe economy, the major substance of male-female roledifferentiation, the most immediate physical and psychologicalreality of being a woman. From the age of11 or 12 until she dies, a woman will spend a large partof her time, money, and energy on binding, plucking,painting, and deodorizing herself. It is commonly andwrongly said that male transvestites through the use ofmakeup and costuming caricature the women theywould become, but any real knowledge of the romanticethos makes clear that these men have penetrated to thecore experience of being a woman, a romanticized construct.The technology of beauty, and the message it carries,is handed down from mother to daughter. Motherteaches daughter to apply lipstick, to shave under herarms, to bind her breasts, to wear a girdle and highheeledshoes. Mother teaches daughter concomitantlyher role, her appropriate behavior, her place. Motherteaches daughter, necessarily, the psychology whichdefines womanhood: a woman must be beautiful, inorder to please the amorphous and amorous Him. Whatwe have called the romantic ethos operates as vividlyin 20th-century Amerika and Europe as it did in 10thcenturyChina.This cultural transfer of technology, role, and psychologyvirtually affects the emotive relationship betweenmother and daughter. It contributes substantiallyto the ambivalent love-hate dynamic of that relationship.What must the Chinese daughter/child have felt towardthe mother who bound her feet? What does any daughter/childfeel toward the mother who forces her to do

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding 115painful things to her own body? The mother takes onthe role o f enforcer: she uses seduction, command, allmanner o f force to coerce the daughter to conform tothe demands o f the culture. It is because this role becomesher dominant role in the mother-daughter relationshipthat tensions and difficulties between mothersand daughters are so often unresolvable. The daughterwho rejects the cultural norms enforced by the motheris forced to a basic rejection o f her own mother, a recognitiono f the hatred and resentment she felt towardthat mother, an alienation from mother and societyso extreme that her own womanhood is denied by both.The daughter who internalizes those values and endorsesthose same processes is bound to repeat theteaching she was taught —her anger and resentment remainsubterranean, channeled against her own femaleoffspring as well as her mother.Pain is an essential part o f the grooming process,and that is not accidental. Plucking the eyebrows,shaving under the arms, wearing a girdle, learning towalk in high-heeled shoes, having one’s nose fixed,straightening or curling one’s hair —these things hurt.The pain, o f course, teaches an important lesson: noprice is too great, no process too repulsive, no operationtoo painful for the woman who would be beautiful.The tolerance of pain and the romanticization of that tolerancebegins here, in preadolescence, in socialization, andserves to prepare women for lives of childbearing, selfabnegation,and husband-pleasing. The adolescentexperience o f the “pain o f being a woman” casts thefeminine psyche into a masochistic mold and forcesthe adolescent to conform to a self-image which bases

116 Woman Hatingitself on mutilation of the body, pain happily suffered,and restricted physical mobility. It creates the masochisticpersonalities generally found in adult women:subservient, materialistic (since all value is placed on thebody and its ornamentation), intellectually restricted,creatively impoverished. It forces women to be a sex oflesser accomplishment, weaker, as underdeveloped asany backward nation. Indeed, the effects of that prescribedrelationship between women and their bodiesare so extreme, so deep, so extensive, that scarcely anyarea of human possibility is left untouched by it.Men, of course, like a woman who “takes care ofherself. ” The male response to the woman who is madeupand bound is a learned fetish, societal in its dimensions.One need only refer to the male idealization ofthe bound foot and say that the same dynamic is operatinghere. Romance based on role differentiation, superioritybased on a culturally determined and rigidly enforcedinferiority, shame and guilt and fear of womenand sex itself: all necessitate the perpetuation of theseoppressive grooming imperatives.The meaning of this analysis of the romantic ethossurely is clear. A first step in the process of liberation(women from their oppression, men from the unfreedomof their fetishism) is the radical redefining of therelationship between women and their bodies. Thebody must be freed, liberated, quite literally: from paintand girdles and all varieties of crap. Women must stopmutilating their bodies and start living in them. Perhapsthe notion of beauty which will then organicallyemerge will be truly democratic and demonstrate arespect for human life in its infinite, and most honorable,variety.

BEAUTY HURTS

CHAPTER 7Gynocide: The WitchesIt has never yet been known that an innocentperson has been punished on suspicionof witchcraft, and there is no doubt thatGod will never permit such a thing tohappen.Malleus MaleficarumIt would be hard to give an idea of how dark the DarkAges actually were. “Dark” barely serves to describe thesocial and intellectual gloom of those centuries. Thelearning of the classical world was in a state of eclipse.The wealth of that same world fell into the hands of theCatholic Church and assorted monarchs, and the onlydemocracy the landless masses of serfs knew was ademocratic distribution of poverty. Disease was an evencrueler exacter than the Lord of the Manor. The medievalChurch did not believe that cleanliness was nextto godliness. On the contrary, between the temptationsof the flesh and the Kingdom of Heaven, a layer of dirt,lice, and vermin was supposed to afford protection andto ensure virtue. Since the flesh was by definition sinful,it was not to be uncovered, washed, or treated for thosediseases which were God’s punishment in the first place— hence the Church’s hostility to the practice of medicineand to the search for medical knowledge. Abettedby this medieval predilection for filth and shame, successiveepidemics of leprosy, epileptic convulsions,118

Gynoclde: The Witches 119and plague decimated the population o f Europe regularly.The Black Death is thought to have killed 25percent o f the entire population o f Europe; two-thirdsto one-half o f the population o f France died; in sometowns every living person died; in London it is estimatedthat one person in ten survived:On Sundays, after Mass, the sick came in scores,crying for help and words were all they got: You havesinned, and God is afflicting you. Thank Him: you willsuffer so much the less torment in the life to come.Endure, suffer, die. Has not the Church its prayersfor the dead. 1Hunger and misery, the serf’s constant companions,may well have induced the kinds o f hallucinations andhysteria which profound ignorance translated as demonicpossession. Disease, social chaos, peasant insurrections,outbreaks o f dancing mania (tarantism)with its accompanying mass flagellation — the Churchhad to explain these obvious evils. What kind o f Shepherdwas this whose flock was so cruelly and regularlyset upon? Surely the hell-fires and eternal damnationwhich were vivid in the Christian imagination weremodeled on daily experience, on real earth-lived life.The Christian notion o f the nature o f the Devilunderwent as many transformations as the snake hasskins. In this evolution, natural selection played a determiningrole as the Church bred into its conception thosedeities best suited to its particular brand o f dualistictheology. It is a cultural constant that the gods o f onereligion become the devils o f the next, and the Church,intolerant o f deviation in this as in all other areas,

Woman Hatingvilified the gods of those pagan religions which threatenedCatholic supremacy in Europe until at least the15th century. The pagan religions were not monotheisticand their pantheons were scarcely conservativein number. The Church had a slew of deities todispatch and would have done so speedily had not theold gods their faithful adherents who clung to the oldpractices, who had local power, who had to be pacified.Accordingly, the Church did a kind of roulette and sentsome gods to heaven (canonizing them) and others tohell (damning them). Especially in southern Europe thelocal deities, formerly housed on Olympus, were allowedto continue their traditional vocations of healing thesick and protecting the traveler. The Church oftentransformed the names of the gods —so as not to beembarrassed, no doubt. Apollo, for instance, becameSt. Apollinaris; Cupid became St. Valentine. The pagangods were also allowed to retain their favorite haunts —shrines, trees, wells, burial grounds, now newly decoratedwith a cross.But in northern Europe the old gods did not fareas well. The peoples of northern Europe were temperamentallyand culturally quite different from the LatinChristians, and their religions centered around animaltotemism and fertility rites. The “heathens” adheredto a primitive animism. They worshiped nature (archenemyof the Church), which was manifest in spiritswho inhabited stones, rivers, and trees. In the paleolithichunting stage, they were concerned with magicalcontrol of animals. In the later neolithic agriculturalstage, fertility practices to ensure the food supplypredominated.

Gynocide: The Witches 121Anthropologists now believe that man’s first representationo f any anthropomorphic deity is that o f ahorned figure who wears a stag’s head and is apparentlydancing. That figure is to be found in a cavern in Arriege.Early religions actively worshiped animals, andin particular animals which symbolized male fertility—thebull, goat, or stag. Ecstatic dancing, feasts,sacrifice o f the god or his representative (human or animal)were parts o f the rites. The magician-priest-shamanbecame the earthly incarnation o f the god-animal andapparently dressed in the skins o f the sacred animal(even the Pharaoh o f Egypt had an animal tail attachedto his girdle). There he stood, replete with horns andhooves—the primitive deity, attributes o f him echoingin the later deities Osiris, Isis, Hathor, Pan, and Janus.His worship was assimilated into the phallic worship o fthe northern sky-thunder-warrior gods (the influenceo f which can be seen in Druidic practices). These paganrites and deities maintained their divinity in the masspsyche despite all o f the Church’s attempts to blacklistthem. Some kings o f England were converted by themissionaries, only to revert to the old faith when themissionaries left. Others maintained two altars, onedevoted to Christ, one to the horned god. The peasantsnever played politics—they clung to the fertility-magicbeliefs. Until the 10th century, the Church protestedthis willful “devil worship” but could do nothing butissue proclamations, impose penances and fasts, and, o fcourse, carry on the unending struggle against natureand the flesh.This was a serious business, for the end o f the worldwas believed to be imminent. For good Christians, prep­

122 Woman Hatingarations to depart this earthly abode included renunciationof all hedonistic activities (eating, dancing, fucking,etc. ). St. Simon Stylites, in his attempt to avoid thecrime of being human, fled to the desert where heerected a pillar on which he mortified his flesh for mostof his 72 years. He was tempted throughout by visionsof lascivious women. Indeed, it required starvation,incessant prayer, and flagellation to be visited by lasciviouswomen in those days and still lead the perfectChristian life.The extremeness of the Church's ascetic imperativesinvited a reciprocal debauchery. The nobility, whennot out butchering, enforced that most curious ofcustoms, the jus primae noctis, which legitimated the rapeof newly wed peasant women. The Crusaders broughtback spices and syphilis from the East —that summingup their knowledge of Arab culture. The clergy wasso openly corrupt and sensual that successive popeswere forced to acknowledge it. “By 1102 a church councilhad to state specifically that priests should be degradedfor sodomy and anathematized for 'obstinatesodomy. ' ” 2 Bishops and cardinals were also known tofuck around: “A typical example is that Bishop of Toul. . . whose favorite concubine was his own daughterby a nun of Epinal." 3 The monasteries and cloisterswere rampant with homosexuality, but nuns and monksdid occasionally get together for heterosexual fucking.Until the 12th century, there were basically threekinds of relationship to the Church. There were theascetics who fled the cities to roam like beasts in thewilderness and emulated St. Simon, who made a pig-styhis home when not on the pillar. The ascetics mortified

Gynocide: The Witches 123the flesh while awaiting cataclysmic destruction andeternal resurrection. There were the nobility, theclergy, and the soldiers, who delighted in carnal excessesof every sort, and the serfs who went on breedingbecause it was their only outlet and because the noblesencouraged increases in the number o f tenants. Thelast group, crucial to this period, were the heretics.In the 12th century various groups, viewing the abominationso f Christianity with increasing horror, began tovoice openly and even loudly their skepticism. Thesesects played a prominent role in shaping the Church’sidea o f the Devil.The Waldenses, Manicheans, and Cathari were theprincipal heretical sects. It is said that “the Waldenseswere burnt for the practices for which the Franciscanswere later canonized. ” 4 Their crime was to expose andto mock the clergy as frauds. For their piety theysuffered the fate o f all heretics, which was burning.More influential and more dangerous were the Manicheans,who traced their origins to the Persian Maniwho had been crucified in a . d. 276. The Manicheansworshiped one God, who incorporated both good andevil, the ancient Zoroastrian idea. The Cathari, whowere equally maligned by the Christians, also worshipedthe dual principle:. . . the chief outstanding quality of the Cathari wastheir piety and charity. They were divided into twosections: the ordinary lay believers and the Perfecti,who believed in complete abstinence and even thelogical end of all asceticism — the Endura —a passionatedisavowal of physical humanity which led them tostarvation and even apparently to mass suicide. They

124 Woman Halingadopted most of the Christian teaching and dogma ofthe New Testament, mixed with Gnostic ritual, usingasceticism as an end to visions and other-consciousness.They were so loyal to their beliefs that a John of Toulousewas able to plead before his judges in 1230...“Lords: hear me. I am no heretic; for I have a wife andlie with her, and have children; and I eat flesh and lieand swear, and am a faithful Christian. ” Many of themseem, indeed, to have lived with the barren piety ofthe saints. They were accordingly accused of sexualorgies and sacrilege, and burned, and scourged, andharried. Nevertheless the heresy flourished, andCathari were able to hold conferences on equal termswith orthodox bishops. 5The Holy Inquisition, in its infancy, exterminated theCathari, tried to exterminate the Jews, and then wenton to exterminate the Knights Templars, the Christianorganization of knighthood and conquest which hadbecome too powerful and wealthy. It had become independentof clergy and kings, and had thereby incurredthe wrath of both. With these experiences underits expanding belt, the Inquisition in the 15th centuryturned to the persecution of those most heinous of allheretics, the witches, that is, to all of those who still clungto the old cult beliefs of pagan Europe.The Manicheans and Cathari had, in order to accountfor the existence of good and evil (the thorniest oftheological problems), worshiped good and evil both.The Catholics, not able to accept that solution, developeda complex theology concerning the relationshipbetween God and the Devil, now called Satan,which rested on the weird idea that Satan was limitedin some specific ways, but very marvelous, all of his

Gynocide: The Witches 125machinations, curses, and damnations being “by God’spermission” and a testimony to God’s divine majesty.Here we have the Catholic version o f double-doublethink. Through the processes o f Aristotle’s famouslogic, as adapted by St. Thomas Aquinas, which wasthe basis of Catholic theology, it now became clearthat not to believe in the literal existence o f Satan wastantamount to atheism. The evil principle, articulatedby the Manicheans and Cathari, was absorbed intoCatholicism, along with the horned figure o f the oldpagan cults, to produce the horned, clawed, sulphurous,black, fire and brimstone Satan o f the medieval Christianiconographers.Later Calvin and Luther also made their contributions.Luther had more personal contact with Satanthan any man before or since. He proclaimed Satan“Prince” o f this earthly realm and considered all earthlyexperiences under his domination. Luther and Calvinagreed that good works no longer counted —only divinegrace for the elect was sufficient to ensure entrance intothe Kingdom o f God. Thus Reformation Protestantismobliterated the small measure o f hope that evenCatholicism offered. Calvin himself was a voraciouswitch hunter and burner.Although the Protestants contributed without modestyand with great enthusiasm to the witch terror, wefind the origins o f the actual, organized persecutions,not unexpectedly, in the Bull o f Innocent VIII, issuedDecember 9, 1484. The Pope named Heinrich Kramerand James Sprenger as Inquisitors and asked them todefine witchcraft, describe the modus operandi o fwitches, and standardize trial procedures and sen­

126 Woman Hatingtencing. The papal Bull reversed the Church’s previousposition, which had been formulated by a synod inA. D. 785:. . . if somebody, deceived by the devil, following thecustom of the heathen, believes that some man orwoman, is a striga who eats men, and for that reasonburns her or gives her flesh to eat, or eats it, he is tobe punished by death. 6The Church had accordingly for 7 centuries consideredthe belief in witchcraft a heathen belief and the burningof alleged witches a capital crime. Pope Innocent,however, secure in papal infallibility and demonstratinga true political sensibility (leading to the consolidationof power), described the extent of his concern:It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not withoutafflicting Us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts ofNorthern Germany, as well as in the provinces, townships,territories, districts, and dioceses of Mainz,Cologne, Treves, Saltzburg, and Bremen, manypersons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvationand straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandonedthemselves to devils, incubi [male] and succubi[female], and by their incantations, spells, conjurations,and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities andhorrid offenses, have slain infants yet in the mother'swomb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted theproduce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruitof the trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burthen,herd beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards,orchards, meadows, pastureland, corn, wheat,and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflictand torment men and women, beasts of burthen,

Gynocide: The Witches 127herd beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, withterrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internaland external; they hinder men from performingthe sexual act and women from conceiving, whencehusbands cannot know their wives nor wives receivetheir husbands; over and above this, they blasphemouslyrenounce that Faith which is theirs by theSacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of theEnemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committingand perpetrating the foulest abominations andfilthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls,whereby they outrage Divine Majesty and are a causeof scandal and danger to very many. 7T o deal with the increasing tide o f witchcraft andin conformity with the Pope’s orders, Sprenger andKramer collaborated on the Malleus Maleficarum. Thisdocument, a monument to Aristode’s logic and academicmethodology (quoting and footnoting “authorities”),catalogues the major concerns o f 15th-centuryCatholic theology:Question I. Whether the Belief that there are suchBeings as Witches is so Essential a Part of the CatholicFaith that Obstinancy to maintain the Opposite Opinionmanifestly savours of Heresy (Answer: Yes)Question III. Whether Children can be Generated byIncubi and Succubi (Answer: Yes)Question VIII. Whether Witches can Hebetate the Powerof Generation or Obstruct the Venereal Act (Answer:Yes)Question IX. Whether Witches may work some PrestidigitatoryIllusion so that the Male Organ appears to

128 Woman Hatingbe entirely removed and separate from the Body (Answer:Yes)Question XL That Witches who are Midwives in VariousWays Kill the Child Conceived in the Womb, andProcure Abortion; or if they do not do this, OfferNew-born Children to the Devils (Answer: Yes)8The Malleus also describes the ritual and content ofwitchcraft per se, though in the tradition of paternalismindigenous to the Church, Sprenger and Kramer arecareful not to give formulae for charms or other dangerousinformation. They write “of the several Methodsby which Devils through Witches Entice and Allure theInnocent to the Increase of that Horrid Craft and company”;“of the Way whereby a Formal Pact with Evil ismade”; “How they are Transported from Place toPlace”; “Here follows the Way whereby Witches copulatewith those Devils known as Incubi, ” 9 etc. They documenthow witches injure cattle, cause hailstorms andtempests, illnesses in people and animals, bewitch men,change themselves into animals, change animals intopeople, commit acts of cannibalism and murder. Themain concern of the Malleus is with natural events,nature, the real dynamic world which refused to conformto Catholic doctrine —the Malleus, with tragicwrong-headedness, explains most aspects of biology,sexology, medicine, and weather in terms of the demonic.Before we approach the place of women in this mostChristian piece of Western history, the importance ofthe Malleus itself must be understood. In the DarkAges, few people read and books were hard to come by.Yet the Malleus was printed in numerous editions. It was

Gynocide: The Witches 129found in every courtroom. It had been read by everyjudge, each o f whom would know it chapter and verse.The Malleus had more currency than the Bible. It wastheology, it was law. T o disregard it, to challenge itsauthority (“seemingly inexhaustible wells o f wisdom, ” 10wrote Montague Summers in 1946, the year I was born)was to commit heresy, a capital crime.Although statistical information on the witchcraftpersecutions is very incomplete, there are judicial recordsextant for particular towns and areas which areaccurate:In almost every province of Germany the persecutionraged with increasing intensity. Six hundred were saidto have been burned by a single bishop in Bamberg,where the special witch jail was kept fully packed. Ninehundred were destroyed in a single year in the bishopricof Wurzburg, and in Nuremberg and other greatcities there were one or two hundred burnings a year.So there were in France and in Switzerland. A thousandpeople were put to death in one year in the districtof Como. Remigius, one of the Inquisitors, who wasauthor of Daemonolatvia, and a judge at Nancy boastedof having personally caused the burning of nine hundredpersons in the course of fifteen years. Delriosays that five hundred were executed in Geneva inthree terrified months in 1515. The Inquisition atToulouse destroyed four hundred persons in a singleexecution, and there were fifty at Douai in a singleyear. In Paris, executions were continuous. In thePyrenees, a wolf country, the popular form was thatof the loup-garou, and De L’Ancre at Labout burnedtwo hundred. 11It is estimated that at least 1, 000 were executed inEngland, and the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish were even

130 Woman Halingfiercer in their purges. It is hard to arrive at a figurefor the whole of the Continent and the British Isles,but the most responsible estimate would seem to be9 million. It may well, some authorities contend, havebeen more. Nine million seems almost moderate whenone realizes that The Blessed Reichhelm of Schongan atthe end of the 13th century computed the number ofthe Devil-driven to be 1,758,064,176. A conservative,Jean Weir, physician to the Duke of Cleves, estimatedthe number to be only 7,409,127. The ratio of women tomen executed has been variously estimated at 20 to 1and 100 to 1. Witchcraft was a woman's crime.Men were, not surprisingly, most often the bewitched.Subject to women’s evil designs, they were terrifiedvictims. Those men who were convicted of witchcraftwere often family of convicted women witches, orwere in positions of civil power, or had political ambitionswhich conflicted with those of the Church, amonarch, or a local dignitary. Men were protected frombecoming witches not only by virtue of superior intellectand faith, but because Jesus Christ, phallic divinity,died “to preserve the male sex from so great a crime:since He was willing to be born and to die for us, thereforeHe has granted to men this privilege. ” 12 Christdied literally for men and left women to fend with theDevil themselves. Without the personal intercession ofChrist, women remained what they had always been inJudeo-Christian culture:Now the wickedness of women is spoken of inEcclesiasticus xxv: There is no head above the headof a serpent: and there is no wrath above the wrath of

Gynocide: The Witches 131a woman. I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragonthan to keep house with a wicked woman. And amongmuch which in that place precedes and follows about awicked woman, he concludes: All wickedness is butlittle to the wickedness of a woman. Wherefore S. JohnChrysostom says on the text. It is not good to marry(S. Matthew xix): What else is woman but a foe tofriendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessaryevil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domesticdanger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature,painted with fair colours!. . . Cicero in his secondbook of The Rhetorics says: The many lusts of men leadthem into one sin, but the one lust of women leadsthem into all sins; for the root of all woman’s vices isavarice.. . . When a woman thinks alone, she thinksevil. 13The word “woman” means “the lust o f the flesh. As itis said: I have found a woman more bitter than death,and a good woman subject to carnal lust. ” 14Other characteristics of women made them amenableto sin and to partnership with Satan:And the first is, that they are more credulous.. . . Thesecond reason is, that women are naturally moreimpressionable, and more ready to receive the influenceof a disembodied spirit.. . .The third reason is that they have slippery tongues,and are unable to conceal from their fellow-womenthose things which by evil arts they know; and sincethey are weak, they find an easy and secret mannerof vindicating themselves by witchcraft.. . .. . . because in these times this perfidy is more oftenfound in women than in men, as we learn by actualexperience, if anyone is curious as to the reason, wemay add to what has already been said the following:

132 Woman Hatingthat since they are feebler both in mind and body, itis not surprising that they should come more under thespell of witchcraft.For as regards intellect, or the understanding ofspiritual things, they seem to be of a different naturefrom men; a fact which is vouched for by the logic ofthe authorities, backed by various examples from theScriptures. Terence says: Women are intellectuallylike children. 15Women are by nature instruments of Satan —they areby nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in theoriginal creation:But the natural reason is that she is more carnalthan a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations.And it should be noted that there was a defectin the formation of the first woman, since she wasformed from a bent rib, that is, rib of the breast, whichis bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. Andsince through this defect she is an imperfect animal,she always deceives.. . . And all this is indicated bythe etymology of the word; for Femina comes from Feand Minus, since she is ever weaker to hold and preservethe Faith. And this as regards faith is of her very nature....16. . . This is so even among holy women, so what must itbe among others? 17In addition, “Women also have weak memories, ” “womanwill follow her own impulse even to her own destruction,” “nearly all the kingdoms of the world have beenoverthrown by women, ” “the world now suffers throughthe malice of women, ” “a woman is beautiful to lookupon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep, ”

Gynocide: The Witches 133“she is a liar by nature, ” “her gait, posture, and habit. . . is vanity o f vanities. ” 18Women are most vividly described as being “morebitter than death” :And I have found a woman more bitter than death,who is the hunter’s snare, and her heart is a net, andher hands are bands. He that pleaseth God shall escapefrom her; but he that is a sinner shall be caughtby her. More bitter than death, that is, than thedevil.. . .More bitter than death, again, because that isnatural and destroys only the body; but the sin whicharose from woman destroys the soul by depriving itof grace, and delivers the body up to the punishmentfor sin.More bitter than death, again, because bodily deathis an open and terrible enemy, but woman is a wheedlingand secret enemy. 19and also:And that she is more perilous than a snare does notspeak of the snare of hunters, but of devils. For menare caught not only through their carnal desires, whenthey see and hear women: for S. Bernard says: Theirface is a burning wind, and their voice the hissing ofserpents.. . . And when it is said that her heart is anet, it speaks of the inscrutable malice which reignsin their hearts.. . .To conclude: All witchcraft comes from carnal lust,which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs xxx: thereare three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourththing which says not, it is enough; that is, the mouthof the womb. 20

134 Woman HatingHere the definition of woman, in common with thepornographic definition, is her carnality; the essenceof her character, in common with the fairy-tale definition,is her malice and avarice. The words flow almosttoo easily in our psychoanalytic age: we are dealingwith an existential terror of women, of the “mouth ofthe womb, ” stemming from a primal anxiety about malepotency, tied to a desire for self (phallic) control; menhave deep-rooted castration fears which are expressedas a horror of the womb. These terrors form the substrataof a myth of feminine evil which in turn justifiedseveral centuries of gynocide.The evidence, provided by the Malleus and the executionswhich blackened those centuries, is almostwithout limit. One particular concern was that devilsstole semen (vitality) from innocent, sleeping men —seductive witches visited men in their sleep, and did theevil stealing. As Ernest Jones wrote:The explanation for these fantasies is surely not hard.A nightly visit from a beautiful or frightful being whofirst exhausts the sleeper with passionate embraces andwithdraws from him a vital fluid: all this can pointonly to a natural and common process, namely tonocturnal emissions accompanied by dreams of a moreor less erotic nature. In the unconscious mind blood iscommonly an equivalent for semen. 21To be dreamed of often ended in slow burning on thestake.The most blatant proof of the explicitly sexual natureof the persecutions, however, had to do with one ofthe witches' most frequent crimes: they cast “glamours”

Gynocide: The Witches 135over the male organ so that it disappeared entirely.Sprenger and Kramer go to great lengths to prove thatwitches do not actually remove the genital, only renderit invisible. If such a glamour lasts for under 3 years,a marriage cannot be annulled; if it lasts for 3 years orlonger, it is considered a permanent fact and does annulany marriage. Catholics now seeking grounds for divorceshould perhaps consider using that one.Men lost their genitals quite frequently. Most often,the woman responsible for the loss was a cast-off mistress,maliciously turned to witchcraft. If the bewitchedman could identify the woman who had afflicted him, hecould demand reinstatement o f his genitals:A young man who had lost his member and suspecteda certain woman, tied a towel about her neck, chokedher and demanded to be cured. “The witch touchedhim with her hand between the thighs, saying, ‘Nowyou have your desire. ’ ” His member was immediatelyrestored. 22Often the witches, greedy by virtue o f womanhood,were not content with the theft of one genital:And what then is to be thought of those witches who inthis way sometimes collect male organs, as many astwenty or thirty members together, and put them in abird’s nest or shut them up in a box, where they movethemselves like living members and eat oats and corn, ashas been seen by many as is a matter of common report?23How can we understand that millions o f people forcenturies believed as literal truth these seemingly idi­

136 Woman Hatingotic allegations? How can we begin to comprehend thatthese beliefs functioned as the basis of a system of jurisprudencethat condemned 9 million persons, mostlywomen, to being burned alive? The literal text of theMalleus Malef icarum, with its frenzied and psychoticwoman-hating and the fact of the 9 million deaths,demonstrates the power of the myth of feminine evil,reveals how it dominated the dynamics of a culture,shows the absolute primal terror that women, as carnalbeings, hold for men.We see in the text of the Malleus not only the fear ofloss of potency or virility, but of the genitals themselves— a dread of the loss of cock and balls. The reasonfor this fear can perhaps be located in the nature ofthe sex act per se: men enter the vagina hard, erect;men emerge drained of vitality, the cock flaccid. Theloss of semen, and the feeling of weakness which is itsbiological conjunct, has extraordinary significance tomen. Hindu tradition, for instance, postulates that menmust either expel the semen and then vacuum it backup into the cock, or not ejaculate at all. For those Westernmen for whom orgasm is simultaneous withejaculation, sex must be a most literal death, withthe mysterious, muscled, pulling vagina the deathdealer.To locate the origins of the myth of feminine evilin male castration and potency fears is not so much toparticipate in the Freudian world view as it is to acceptand apply the anthropologist's method and link upWestern Judeo-Christian man with Australian, African,or Trobriand primitives. To do so is to challenge theegotism which informs our historical attitude toward

Gynocide: The Witches 137ourselves and which would separate us from the rest o fthe species. There is nothing to indicate that “civilization,” “culture, ” and/or Christianity have in any waymoderated the primal male dread o f castration. Quitethe contrary, history might even be defined as the studyo f the concrete expression o f that dread.T he Christians in their manifold variety were continuingthe highly developed Jewish tradition o f misogyny,patriarchy, and sexist suppression, alternativelyknown as the Garden-of-Eden-Hype. The Adam andEve creation myth is the basic myth o f man and woman,creation, death, and sex. There is another Jewish legend,namely that o f Adam-Lilith, which never assumedthat place because it implies other, nonsexist, nonpatriarchalvalues. The Genesis account o f Adam and Eve inEden involves, according to Hays, three themes: “thetransition from primitive life to civilization, the comingo f death, and the acquisition o f knowledge. ” 24 As Hayspoints out, Adam has been told by God the Father thatif he eats from the Tree o f Knowledge he will die. Theserpent tells Eve that she and Adam will not die. Theserpent, it turns out, told the immediate truth: Adamand Eve do not keel over dead; rather, they know eachother carnally.Sex is, biblically speaking, the sole source o f civilization,death, and knowledge. As punishment, Adammust go to work and Eve must bear children. We havehere the beginning o f the human family and the workethic, both tied to guilt and sexual repression by virtueo f their origins. One could posit, with all the assuranceof a Monday-morning quarterback, that Adam and Evealways were mortal and carnal and that through eating

138 Woman Hatingthe forbidden fruit only became aware of what theircondition had always been. God has never been verystraightforward with people.Whether the precise moral of the story is that deathis a direct punishment for carnal knowledge (whichmight make guilt an epistemological corollary) or thatawareness of sex and death are coterminous, the fact ofman knowing and feeling guilt is rooted in the Oedipalcontent of the legend. In a patriarchy, one does notdisobey the father.Adam’s legacy post-Eden is sexual knowledge, mortality,guilt, toil, and the fear of castration. Adam becamea human male, the head of a family. His sin waslesser than Eve’s, seemingly by definition again. Evenin Paradise, wantonness, infidelity, carnality, lust, greed,intellectual inferiority, and a metaphysical stupidityearmark her character. Yet her sin was greater thanAdam’s. God had, in his oft-noted wisdom, created herin a way which left her defenseless against the wiles ofthe snake —the snake approached her for that veryreason. Yet she bears responsibility for the fall. Doubledoublethink is clearly biblical in its origins.Eve’s legacy was a twofold curse: “Unto the womanHe said: ‘I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail;in pain thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desireshall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. ’ ” 25Thus, the menstrual cycle and the traditional agony ofchildbirth do not comprise the full punishment —patriarchyis the other half of that ancient curse.The Christians, of course, like Avis, trying harder,seeing in woman the root of all evil, limited her tobreeding more sinners for the Church to save. No won­

Gynocide: The Witches 139der then that women remained faithful adherents o f theolder totemic cults o f Western Europe which honoredfemale sexuality, deified the sexual organs and reproductivecapacity, and recognized woman as embodyingthe regenerative power o f nature. The rituals o f thesecults, centering as they did on sexual potency, birth,and phenomena connected to fertility, had been developedby women. Magic was the substance o f ritual,the content o f belief. The magic o f the witches was animposing catalogue o f medical skills concerning reproductiveand psychological processes, a sophisticatedknowledge o f telepathy, auto- and hetero-suggestion,hypnotism, and mood-controlling drugs. Women knewthe medicinal nature o f herbs and developed formulaefor using them. The women who were faithful to thepagan cults developed the science o f organic medicine,using vegetation, before there was any notion o f theprofession o f medicine. Paracelsus, the most famousphysician o f the Middle Ages, claimed that everythinghe knew he had learned from “the good women. ” 26Experimenting with herbs, women learned that thosewhich would kill when administered in large doseshad curative powers when administered in smalleramounts. Unfortunately, it is as poisoners that thewitches are remembered. The witches used drugs likebelladonna and aconite, organic amphetamines, andhallucinogenics. They also pioneered the developmentof analgesics. They performed abortions, provided allmedical help for births, were consulted in cases o f impotencewhich they treated with herbs and hypnotism,and were the first practitioners o f euthanasia. Since theChurch enforced the curse o f Eve by refusing to permit

140 Woman Hatingany alleviation of the pain of childbirth, it was left tothe witches to lessen pain and mortality as best theycould. It was especially as midwives that these learnedwomen offended the Church, for, as Sprenger andKramer wrote, “No one does more harm to the CatholicFaith than mid wives. ” 27 The Catholic objection to abortioncentered specifically on the biblical curse whichmade childbearing a painful punishment —it did nothave to do with the “right to life” of the unborn fetus.It was also said that midwives were able to remove laborpains from the woman and transfer those pains to herhusband—clearly in violation of divine injunction andintention both.The origins of the magical content of the pagan cultscan be traced back to the fairies, who were a real, neolithicpeople, smaller in stature than the natives ofnorthern Europe or England. They were a pastoralpeople who had no knowledge of agriculture. Theyfled before stronger, technologically more advancedmurderers and missionaries who had contempt fortheir culture. They set up communities in the inlandsand concealed their dwellings in mounds halfhidden in the ground. The fairies developed thosemagical skills for which the witches, centuries later,were burned.The socioreligious organization of the fairy culturewas matriarchal and probably polyandrous. The fairyculture was still extant in England as late as the 17thcentury when even the pagan beliefs of the early witcheshad degenerated into the Christian parody which weassociate with Satanism. The Christians rightly recognizedthe fairies as ancient, original sorcerers, but

Gynoclde: The Witches 141wrongly saw their whole culture as an expression o f thedemonic. There was communication between the fairiesand the pagan women, and any evidence that a womanhad visited the fairies was considered sure proof thatshe was a witch.There were, then, three separate, though interrelated,phenomena: the fairy race with its matriarchalsocial organization, its knowledge of esoteric magicand medicine; the woman-oriented fertility cults, alsopractitioners o f esoteric magic and medicine; and later,the diluted witchcraft cults, degenerate parodies ofChristianity. There is particular confusion when onetries to distinguish between the last two phenomena.Many o f the women condemned by the Inquisition weretrue devotees o f the Old Religion. Many were confusedby Christian militancy and aggression, not tomention torture and threat o f burning, and saw themselvesas diabolical, damned witches.An understanding of what the Old Religion reallywas, how it functioned, is crucial if we want to understandthe precise nature o f the witch hunt, the amountand kind of distortion that the myth o f feminine evilmade possible, who the women were who were beingburned, and what they had really done. The informationavailable comes primarily from the confessionsof accused witches, recorded and distorted by the Inquisitors,and from the work o f anthropologists likeMargaret Murray and C. L'Estrange Ewen. The scenarioof the witchcraft cults is pieced together fromthose sources, but many pieces are missing. A lot ofknowledge disappears with 9 million people.The religion was organized with geographic integ­

142 Woman Hatingrity. Communities had their own organizations, mainlystructured in covens, with local citizens as administrators.There were weekly meetings which took care ofbusiness —they were called esbats. Then there werelarger gatherings, called sabbats, where many covensmet together for totemic festivities. There may havebeen an actual continental organization with one allpowerfulhead, but evidence on this point is ambiguous.It was a proselytizing religion in that nonmembers wereapproached by local officials and asked to join. Conditionsof membership in a coven were the free consentof the individual, abjuration of all other beliefs andloyalties (particularly renunciation of any loyalty to thenew Catholic Faith), and an avowal of allegiance to thehorned god. Membership was contractual, that is, amember signed an actual contract which limited herobligations to the cult to a specific number of years,at the end of which she was free to terminate allegiance.Most often the Devil “promised her Mony, and that shewould live gallantly and have the pleasure of theWorld. . . ” 28The neophyte’s debts probably were paidand she no doubt also learned the secrets of medicine,drugs, telepathy, and simple sanitation, which wouldhave considerably improved all aspects of her earthlyexistence. It was only according to the Church that shelost her soul as part of the bargain. And, needless tosay, it was the Church, not the Devil, which took her life.Once the neophyte made the decision for thehorned god, she went through a formal initiation, oftenconducted at the sabbat. The ceremony was simple.The initiate declared that she was joining the covenof her own free will and swore devotion to the master

Gynocide: The Witches 143o f the coven who represented the horned god. She wasthen marked with some kind o f tattoo which was calledthe witches’ mark. The inflicting o f the tattoo was painful,and the healing process was long. When healed, thescar was red or blue and indelible. One method particularlyfavored by the witch hunters when hunting was totake a suspected woman, shave her pubic and otherbodily hair (including head hair, eyebrows, etc. ) and,upon finding any scar, find her guilty o f witchcraft.Also, the existence o f any supernumerary nipple, commonin all mammals, was proof of guilt.The initiate was often given a new name, especiallyif she had a Christian name like Mary or Faith. Children,when they reached puberty, were initiated intothe coven — parents naturally wanted their children toshare the family religion. The Inquisition was as ruthlesswith children as it was with adults. There arestories o f children being whipped as their motherswere being burned —prevention, it was called.The religious ceremony, which was the main contento f the sabbat, included dancing, eating, andfucking. The worshipers paid homage to the hornedgod by kissing his representative, the master o f thecoven, anywhere he indicated. The kiss was generallyon the master’s ass —designed, some say, to provoke theantisodomy Christians. That ritual kiss was possiblyplaced on a mask which the costumed figure —masked,horned, wearing animal skins, and probably an artificialphallus —wore under his tail. The disguise conjures upthe ancient, two-faced Janus.The witches danced ring dances in a direction oppositeto the path o f the sun, an ancient, symbolic

144 Woman Hatingrite. The Lutherans and Puritans forbade dancing becauseit evoked for them the spectacle of pagan worship.After the dancing, the witches ate. Often theybrought their own food, rather in the tradition of picniclunches, and sometimes the coven leader provideda real feast. The Christians alleged that the witches werecannibals and that their dinner was an orgy of humanflesh, cooked and garnished as only the Devil knew how.Actually, the supper common to all sabbats was a simplemeal of pedestrian food.The whole notion of cannibalism and sacrifice hasbeen stubbornly, persistently, and purposely misunderstood.There is no evidence that any living childwas killed to be eaten, or that any living child was sacrificed.There is evidence that sometimes dead infantswere ritually eaten, or used in ritual. Cannibalism,and its not so symbolic substitute, animal sacrifice, wasa vital part of the ritual of all early religions, includingthe Jewish one. The witches participated in thistradition rather modestly: they generally sacrificed agoat or a hen. It was the Christians who developed andextended the Old World system of sacrifice and cannibalismto almost surreal ends: Christ, the sacrificiallamb, who died an agonizing death on the cross toensure forgiveness of men’s sins and whose followerssymbolically, even today, eat of his flesh and drink ofhis blood — what is the Eucharist if not fossilized cannibalism?The final activity of the sabbat was a phallic orgy —heathen, drug-abetted, communal sex. The sex of thesabbat is distinguished by descriptions of pain. It wassaid that intercourse was painful, that the phallus of the

Gynocide: The Witches 145masked coven leader was cold and oversized, that nowoman ever conceived. It would seem that the hornedfigure used an artificial phallus and could service allthe celebrants. The Old Religion, as opposed to theChristian religion, celebrated sexuality, fertility, natureand woman's place in it, and communal sex was a logicaland most sacral rite.The worship of animals is also indigenous to naturebasedreligious systems. Early people existed amonganimals, scarcely distinct from them. Through religiousritual, people differentiated themselves from animalsand gave honor to them —they were food, sustenance.There was a respect for the natural world — people werehunter and hunted simultaneously. Their perspectivewas acute. They worshiped the spirit and power theysaw manifest in the carnivore world o f which they werean integral part. When man began to be “civilized, ” toseparate himself out o f nature, to place himself overand above woman (he became Mind, she became Carnality)and other animals, he began to seek power overnature, magical control. The witch cults still had astrong sense o f people as part o f nature, and animalsmaintained a prime place in both ritual and consciousnessfor the witches. The Christians, who had a profoundand compulsive hatred for the natural world, thoughtthat the witches, through malice and a lust for power(pure projection, no doubt), had mobilized nature/animalsinto a robotlike anti-Christian army. The witchhunters were convinced that toads, rats, dogs, cats,mice, etc., took orders from witches, carried curses fromone farm to another, caused death, hysteria, and disease.They thought that nature was one massive, crawl­

146 Woman Hatinging conspiracy against them, and that the conspiracywas organized and controlled by the wicked women.They can in fact be credited with pioneering the politicsof total paranoia —they developed the classic model forthat particular pathology which has, as its logical consequence,genocide. Their methods of dealing with thewitch menace were developed empirically— they had agreat respect for what worked. For instance, when theysuspected a woman of witchcraft, they would lock herin an empty room for several days or weeks and if anyliving creature, any insect or spider, entered that room,that creature was identified as the woman's familiar,and she was proved guilty of witchcraft. Naturally,given the fact that bugs are everywhere, particularlyin the woodwork, this test of guilt always worked.Cats were particularly associated with witches. Thatassociation is based on the ancient totemic significanceof the cat:It is well known that to the Egyptians cats weresacred. They were regarded as incarnations of Isisand there was also a cat deity.. . . Through Osiris(Ra) they were associated with the sun; the rays of the“solar cat, ” who was portrayed as killing the “serpentof darkness” at each dawn, were believed to producefecundity in Nature, and thus cats were figures offertility.. . . Cats were also associated with Hathor,a cow-headed goddess, and hence with crops andrain.. . .Still stronger, however, was the association of thecat with the moon, and thus she was a virgin goddess —a virgin-mother incarnation. In her character as moongoddessshe was inviolate and self-renewing. . . thecircle she forms in a curled-up position [is seen as] thesymbol for eternity, an unending re-creation. 29

Gynocide: The Witches 147The Christians not only converted the horned god intoSatan, but also the sacred cat into a demonic incarnation.The witches, in accepting familiars and particularlyin their special feeling for cats, only participated in anancient tradition which had as its substance love andrespect for the natural world.It was also believed that the witch could transformherself into a cat or other animal. This notion, calledlycanthropy, is twofold:. . . either the belief that a witch or devil-ridden persontemporarily assumes an animal form, to ravage ordestroy; or, that they create an animal “double” inwhich, leaving the lifeless human body at home, he orshe can wander, terrorize, or batten on mankind. 30The origins of the belief in lycanthropy can be tracedto group rituals in which celebrants, costumed as animals,recreated animal movements, sounds, even huntingpatterns. As group ritual, those celebrations wouldbe prehistorical. The witches themselves, through theuse o f belladonna, aconite, and other drugs, felt thatthey did become animals. * The effect of the belief inlycanthropy on the general population was electric: astray dog, a wild cat, a rat, a toad —all were witches,agents of Satan, bringing with them drought, disease,death. Any animal in the environment was dangerous,demonic. The legend of the werewolf (popularized inthe Red Riding Hood fable) caused terror. At Labout,* For a contemporary account of lycanthropy, I would suggest The Teachingsof Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda (New York:Ballantine Books, 1968), pp. 170-84.

148 Woman Hatingtwo hundred people were burned as werewolves. Therewere endless stories of farmers shooting animals whowere plaguing them in the night, only to discover thenext morning that a respectable town matron had beenwounded in precisely the same way.Witches, of course, could also fly on broomsticks,and often did. Before going to the sabbat, they annointedtheir bodies with a mixture of belladonna andaconite, which caused delirium, hallucination, and gavethe sensation of flying. The broomstick was an almostarchetypal symbol of womanhood, as the pitchfork wasof manhood. Levitation was considered a rare butgenuine fact:As for its history, it is one of the earliest convictions,common to almost all peoples, that not only dosupernatural beings, angels or devils, fly or float in theair at will, but so can those humans who invoke theirassistance. Levitation among the saints was, and by thedevout is, accepted as an objective fact. The most famousinstance is that of St. Joseph of Cupertino, whoseecstatic flights (and he perched in trees) caused embarrassmentin the seventeenth century. Yet the appearanceof flight, in celestial trance, has been claimedall through the history of the Church, and not only forsuch outstanding figures as St. Francis, St. IgnatiusLoyola, or St. Teresa.. . . In the Middle Ages it wasregarded as a marvel, but a firmly established one.. . . It is not, therefore, at all remarkable that witcheswere believed to fly. . . [though] the Church expresslyforbade, during the reign of Charlemagne, any beliefthat witches flew. 31With typical consistency then, the Church said thatsaints could fly but witches could not. As far as the

Gynocide: The Witches 149witches were concerned, they trusted their experience,they knew that they flew. Here they aligned themselveswith Christian saints, yogis, mystics from all traditions,in the realization o f a phenomenon so ancient that itwould seem to extend almost to the origins o f the religiousimpulse in people.We now know most o f what can be known aboutthe witches: who they were, what they believed, whatthey did, the Church's vision o f them. We have seen thehistorical dimensions o f a myth o f feminine evil whichresulted in the slaughter of 9 million persons, nearlyall women, over 300 years. The actual evidence o f thatslaughter, the remembrance of it, has been suppressedfor centuries so that the myth of woman as the OriginalCriminal, the gaping, insatiable womb, could endure.Annihilated with the 9 million was a whole culture,woman-centered, nature-centered —all o f their knowledgeis gone, all o f their knowing is destroyed. Historians(white, male, and utterly without credibilityfor women, Indians, Blacks, and other oppressed peoplesas they begin to search the ashes of their own pasts)found the massacre of the witches too unimportant toinclude in the chronicles of those centuries except as afootnote, too unimportant to be seen as the substanceof those centuries —they did not recognize the centuriesof gynocide, they did not register the anguish ofthose deaths.Our study o f pornography, our living o f life, tellsus that the myth of feminine evil lived out so resolutelyby the Christians o f the Dark Ages, is alive and well,here and now. Our study of pornography, our livingof life, tells us that though the witches are dead, burned

150 Woman Hatingalive at the stake, the belief in female evil is not, thehatred of female carnality is not. The Church has notchanged its premises; the culture has not refuted thosepremises. It is left to us, the inheritors of that myth,to destroy it and the institutions based on it.

Part FourANDROGYNYWhen the sexual energy of the people isliberated they will break the chains.The struggle to break the form isparamount. Because we are otherwise containedin forms that deny us the possibilityof realizing a form (a technique) to escapethe fire in which we are being consumed.The journey to love is not romantic.Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

We want to destroy sexism, that is, polar role definitionso f male and female, man and woman. We want todestroy patriarchal power at its source, the family; inits most hideous form, the nation-state. We want todestroy the structure o f culture as we know it, its art,its churches, its laws: all o f the images, institutions, andstructural mental sets which define women as hot wetfuck tubes, hot slits.Androgynous mythology provides us with a modelwhich does not use polar role definitions, where thedefinitions are not, implicitly or explicitly, male = good,female = bad, man = human, woman = other. Androgynymyths are multisexual mythological models. Theygo well beyond bisexuality as we know it in the scenariosthey suggest for building community, for realizing thefullest expression o f human sexual possibility andcreativity.Androgyny as a concept has no notion of sexualrepression built into it. Where woman is carnality, andcarnality is evil, it stands to reason (hail reason! ) thatwoman must be chained, whipped, punished, purged;that fucking is shameful, forbidden, fearful, guilt-153

154 Woman Hatingridden. Androgyny as the basis of sexual identity andcommunity life provides no such imperatives. Sexualfreedom and freedom for biological women, or all persons“female, ” are not separable. That they are different,and that sexual freedom has priority, is the worstof sexist hypes. Androgyny can show the way to both.It may be the one road to freedom open to women,men, and that emerging majority, the rest of us.

CHAPTER 8Androgyny:The Mythological ModelIt is a question of finding the right model. We are borninto a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowlycircumscribed: Cinderella, Snow-white, SleepingBeauty; O, Claire, Anne; romantic love and marriage;Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary. These models are thesubstantive message o f this culture —they define psychologicalsets and patterns o f social interaction which,in our adult personae, we live out. We function insidethe socioreligious scenario of right and wrong, goodand bad, licit and illicit, legal and illegal, all saturatedwith shame and guilt. We are programmed by the cultureas surely as rats are programmed to make the arduousway through the scientist’s maze, and that programmingoperates on every level of choice and action. For example,we have seen how the romantic ethos is related tothe way women dress and cosmeticize their bodies andhow that behavior regulates the literal physical mobilityo f women. Take any aspect of behavior and one canfind the source o f the programmed response in the culturalstructure. Western man’s obsessive concern withmetaphysical and political freedom is almost laughablein this context.155

156 Woman HatingDepth psychologists consider man the center of hisworld —his psyche is the primary universe which governs,very directly, the secondary universe, distinctfrom him, of nature; philosophers consider man, inthe fragmented, highly overrated part called intellect,the center of the natural world, indeed its only significantmember; artists consider man, isolated in his creativefunction, the center of the creative process, of thecanvas, of the poem, an engineer of the culture; politiciansconsider man, represented by his sociopoliticalorganization and its armies, the center of whateverplanetary power might be relevant and meaningful;religionists consider God a surrogate man, createdprecisely in man’s image, only more so, to be fatherto the human family. The notion of man as a part of thenatural world, integrated into it, in form as distinct(no more so) as the tarantula, in function as important(no more so) as the honey bee or tree, is in eclipse, andthat eclipse extends not over a decade, or over a century,but over the whole of written history. The arrogancewhich informs man’s relation with nature (simply,he is superior to it) is precisely the same arrogancewhich informs his relationship with woman (simply,he is superior to her). Here we see the full equation:woman = carnality = nature. The separation of manfrom nature, man placing himself over and above it, isdirectly responsible for the current ecological situationwhich may lead to the extinction of many forms of life,including human life. Man has treated nature much ashe has treated woman: with rape, plunder, violence.The phenomenological world is characterized by itsdiversity, the complexity and mutuality of its interac-

Androgyny: The Mythological Model 157tions, and man’s only chance for survival in that worldconsists o f finding the proper relationship to it.In terms o f interhuman relationship, the problem issimilar. As individuals, we experience ourselves as thecenter o f whatever social world we inhabit. We thinkthat we are free and refuse to see that we are functionsof our particular culture. That culture no longer organicallyreflects us, it is not our sum total, it is not the collectivephenomenology o f our creative possibilities —itpossesses and rules us, reduces us, obstructs the flow ofsexual and creative energy and activity, penetrates eveninto what Freud called the id, gives nightmare shape tonatural desire. In order to achieve proper balance ininterhuman interaction, we must find ways to changeourselves from culturally defined agents into naturallydefined beings. We must find ways of destroying thecultural personae imposed on our psyches and we mustdiscover forms o f relationship, behavior, sexual beingand interaction, which are compatible with our inherentnatural possibilities. We must move away from the perverse,two-dimensional definitions which stem fromsexual repression, which are the source o f social oppression,and move toward creative, full, multidimensionalmodes of sexual expression.Essentially the argument is this: we look at the worldwe inhabit and we see disaster everywhere; police states;prisons and mental hospitals filled to overflowing; alienationo f workers from their work, women and menfrom each other, children from the adult community,governments contemptuous of their people, peoplefilled with intense self-hatred; street violence, assault,rape, contract murderers, psychotic killers; acquisition

158 Woman Hatinggone mad, concentrated power and wealth; hunger,want, starvation, camps filled with refugees. Thosephenomena mark the distance between civilized manand natural man, tribal man, whose sexual and socialpatterns functioned in a more integrated, balancedway. We know how it is now, and we want to know howit was then. While we cannot reconstruct the momentwhen humans emerged in evolution into recognizablehumanness, or analyze that person to see what existencewas like, while we cannot seek to emulate rituals andsocial forms of tribal people, or penetrate to and thenimitate the dynamic relationship primitive people hadwith the rest of the natural world, while we cannot evenknow much of what happened before people madepottery and built cities, while we cannot (and perhapswould not) obliterate the knowledge that we do have(of space travel and polio vaccines, cement and Hiroshima),we can still find extant in the culture echoes ofa distant time when people were more together, figurativelyand literally. These echoes reflect a period inhuman development when people functioned as a partof the natural world, not set over against it; when menand women, male and female, were whatever they were,not polar opposites, separated by dress and role intocastes, fragmented pieces of some not-to-be-imaginedwhole.In recent years, depth psychologists in particularhave turned to primitive people and tribal situationsin an effort to penetrate into the basic dynamics ofmale and female. The most notable effort was made byJung, and it is necessary to state here that, admirableas his other work sometimes is, Jung and his followers

Androgyny: The Mythological Model 159have carried the baggage o f patriarchy and sexual dualismwith them into the search. Jung describes male andfemale in the absolute terms native to the culture, asarchetypes preexistent in the psyche. Male is definedas authority, logic, order, that which is saturnian andembodies the consonant values o f patriarchy; female isdefined as emotional, receptive, anarchic, cancerian.Matriarchy preceded patriarchy because patriarchalvalues (particularly the need for complex organization)inform advanced societies, whereas female values informmore primitive tribal societies. As far as individualmen and women are concerned, the male psyche has afeminine component (the subconscious) which is anarchic,emotional, sensitive, lunar, and the femalepersonality has a male component (the conscious, ormind) which can be defined as a capacity for logicalthought. O f course, biological women are ruled, itturns out, by the subconscious; men are ruled, not surprisingly,by the conscious, mind, intellect. One mightimagine a time and place where intellect is not valuedover anarchic, emotional, sensitive —looniness?: butthat would be the most gratuitous kind o f fantasy. Jungnever questioned the cultural arbitrariness o f these categories,never looked at them to see their political implications,never knew that they were sexist, that hefunctioned as an instrument o f cultural oppression.In the book Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modem,M. Esther Harding, a lifelong student o f Jung and aPatron o f the C. G. Jung Institute, applies Jungian ontologyto a study o f mythology. Taking the moon,Luna, as the patron saint of women (ignoring any masculineimagery associated with the moon, and this

160 Woman Hatingimagery is substantial; ignoring any feminine imageryconnected with the sun, and this imagery is substantial),Harding ultimately identifies the female with the demonic,as did the Catholic Church:But if she will stop long enough to look within, shealso may become aware of impulses and thoughtswhich are not in accord with her conscious attitudesbut are the direct outcome of the crude and untamedfeminine being within her. For the most part, however,a woman will not look at these dark secrets of her ownnature. It is too painful, too undermining of the consciouscharacter which she has built up for herself; sheprefers to think that she really is as she appears to be.And indeed it is her task to stand between the Eroswhich is within her, and the world without, andthrough her own womanly adaptation to the worldto make human, as it were, the daemoniac power ofthe nonhuman feminine principle. 1Eros, the subconscious, the flow of human sexual energy—described as the witch burners described it, “thedaemoniac power of the nonhuman feminine principle. ”Harding is absolutely representative of the Jungianpoint of view.It is a natural consequence of this dualistic stancethat male and female are pitted against each other andthat conflict is the dynamic mode of relationship opento male and female, men and women, when they meet:These discrepancies in their attitudes are dependenton the fact that the psychic constitution of men andwomen are essentially different; they are mirror oppositesthe one of the other.. . . So that their essentialnature and values are diametrically opposed. 2

Androgyny: The Mythological Model 161These male and female sets are defined as archetypes,embedded in a collective unconscious, the given structureo f reality. They are polar opposites; their modeo f interaction is conflict. They cannot possibly understandeach other because they are absolutely different:and o f course, it is always easier to do violence to somethingOther, something whose “nature and values”are other. (Women have never understood that theyare, by definition, Other, not male, therefore not human.But men do experience women as being totallyopposite, other. How easy violence is. ) There is, becauseJung was a good man and Jungians are goodpeople, a happy ending: though these two forces, maleand female, are opposite, they are complementary, twohalves o f the same whole. One is not superior, one is notinferior. One is not good, one is not bad. But this resolutionis inadequate because the culture, in its fiction andits history, demonstrates that one (male, logic, order,ego, father) is good and superior both, and that theother (guess which) is bad and inferior both. It is theso-called female principle of Eros that all the paraphernaliaof patriarchy conspires to suppress through the psychological,physiological, and economic oppression of those who are biologicallywomen. Jung’s ontology serves those personsand institutions which subscribe to the myth o f feminineevil.The identification of the feminine with Eros, orerotic energy (carnality by any other name), comesfrom a fundamental misunderstanding o f the nature ofhuman sexuality. The essential information whichwould lead to nonsexist, nonrepressive notions o f sexualityis to be found in androgyny myths, myths which

162 Woman Halingdescribe the creation of the first human being as maleand female in one form. In other words, Jung chose thewrong model, the wrong myths, on which to constructa psychology of male and female. He used myths infusedwith patriarchal values, myths which gained currencyin male-dominated cultures. The anthropologicaldiscoveries which fueled the formation of his theoriesall reveal relatively recent pieces of human history.With few exceptions, all of the anthropological informationwe have deals with the near past. * But the mythswhich are the foundation of and legitimize our cultureare gross perversions of original creation myths whichmolded the psyches of earlier, possibly less self-consciousand more conscious, peoples. The original mythsall concern a primal androgyne —an androgynous godhead,an androgynous people. The corruptions ofthese myths of a primal androgyne without exceptionuphold patriarchal notions of sexual polarity, duality,male and female as opposite and antagonistic. Themyth of a primal androgyne survives as part of a realcultural underground: though it is ignored, despisedby a culture which posits other values, and thoughthose who relate their lifestyles directly to it have beenostracized and persecuted.With all of this talk of myth and mythology, what ismyth, and why does it have such importance? The bestdefinition remains that of Eliade, who wrote in Myths,Dreams, and Mysteries:* It is estimated that the time space between 70 0 0 b . c . (when peoplebegan to domesticate animals'and make pottery) and 1 9 7 4 a . d . is only 2 percentof the whole of human history.

Androgyny: The Mythological Model 163What exactly is a myth? In the language current duringthe nineteenth century, a “myth” meant anythingthat was opposed to “reality”: the creation of Adam,or the invisible man, no less than the history of theworld as described by the Zulus, or the Theogony ofHesiod —these were all “myths. ” Like many anothercliche of the Enlightenment and of Positivism, this,too, was of Christian origin and structure; for, accordingto primitive Christianity, everything whichcould not be justified by reference to one or the otherof the two Testaments was untrue; it was a “fable. ”But the researches of the ethnologists have obliged usto go behind this semantic inheritance from the Christianpolemics against the pagan world. We are at lastbeginning to know and understand the value of themyth, as it has been elaborated in “primitive” andarchaic societies — that is, among those groups of mankindwhere the myth happens to be the very foundationof social life and culture. Now one fact strikes usimmediately: in such societies the myth is thought toexpress the absolute truth, because it narrates a sacredhistory; that is, a transhuman revelation which tookplace at the dawn of the Great Time.. . . Being realand sacred, the myth becomes exemplary, and consequently,repeatable, for it serves as a model, and by thesame token, a justification, for all human actions. Inother words, a myth is a true history of what came to passat the beginning of Time, and one which provides the patternfor human behavior. 3[Italics added]I would extend Eliade’s definition in only one respect.It is not only in primitive and archaic societies thatmyths provide this model for behavior —it is in everyhuman society. The distance between myth and socialorganization is perhaps greater, or more tangled, inadvanced technological societies, but myth still operates

164 Woman Hatingas the substructure of the collective. The story of Adamand Eve will affect the shape of settlements on the moonand Mars, and the Christian version of the primitivemyth of a divine fertility sacrifice saturates the mosttechnologically advanced communications media.What are the myths of androgyny, and how do welocate them behind the myths of polarity with which weare familiar? Let us begin with the Chinese notions of yinand yang.Yin and yang are commonly associated with femaleand male. The Chinese ontology, so appealing in thatit appears to give whole, harmonious, value-free descriptionof phenomena, describes cosmic movement ascyclical, thoroughly interwoven manifestation of yang(masculine, aggressive, light, spring, summer) and yin(female, passive, dark, fall, winter). The sexual identificationsreduce the concepts too often to conceptualpolarities: they are used to fix the proper natures ofmen and women as well as the forces of male and female.These definitions, like the Jungian ones which are basedon them, are seemingly modified by the assertions that(1) all people are composed of both yin and yang,though in the man yang properly predominates and inthe woman yin properly predominates; (2) these maleand female forces are two parts of a whole, equallyvital, mutually indispensable. Unfortunately, as onelooks to day-to-day life, that biological incarnation ofyin, woman, finds herself, as always, the dark half ofthe universe.The sexual connotations of yin and yang, however,are affixed onto the original concepts. They reflect analready patriarchal, and misogynist, culture. Richard

Androgyny: The Mythological Model 165Wilhelm, in an essay on an ancient Chinese text calledThe Secret of the Golden Flower, gives the uncorruptedmeanings o f yin and yang:Out of the Tao, and the Tai-chi [“the great ridgepole, the supreme ultimate”] there develop the principlesof reality, the one pole being the light (yang) andthe other the dark, or the shadowy, (yin). AmongEuropean scholars, some have turned first to sexualreferences for an explanation, but the characters referto phenomena in nature. Yin is shade, therefore thenorth side of a mountain and the south side of a river.. . . Yang, in its original form, indicates flying pennantsand, corresponding to the character of yin, is the southside of a mountain and the north side of a river. Startingonly with the meaning of “light” and “dark, ” theprinciple was then expanded to all polar opposites,including the sexual. However, since both yin and yanghave their common origin in an undivided One andare active only in the realm of phenomena, where yangappears as the active principle and conditions, and yinas the passive principle is derived and conditioned, itis quite clear that a metaphysical dualism is not thebasis for these ideas. 4Light and dark are obvious in a phenomenologicalsense —there is day and it slowly changes into nightwhich then slowly changes into day. When men beganconceptualizing about the nature o f the universe, thephenomena of light and dark were an obvious startingpoint. My own experience is that night and day aremore alike than different —in which case they couldn'tpossibly be opposite. Man, in conceptualizing, hasreduced phenomena to two, when phenomena aremore complex and subtle than intellect can imagine.

166 Woman HatingStill, how is it that it is the feminine, the sexuallyfemale, that is embodied in yin? Even patriarchy andmisogyny began somewhere. Here I can only guess. Weknow that at one time men were hunters and womenwere planters. Both forms of work were essential andarduous. Both demanded incredible physical strengthand considerable knowledge and skill. Why did menhunt and women plant? Clearly women planted becausethey were often pregnant, and though pregnancydid not make them weak and passive, it did mean thatthey could not run, go without food for long periods oftime, survive on the terms that hunting demanded. Itis probable that very early in human history womenalso were hunters, and that it was crucial to the survivalof the species that they develop into planters — first tosupplement the food supply, second to reduce infantand woman mortality. We see that the first division oflabor based on biological sex originated in a fundamentalsurvival imperative. In the earliest of times,with no contraception and no notion of the place of theman in the process of impregnation, women were investedwith a supreme magical power, one which engenderedawe and fear in men. As they developed skillin planting, they embodied even more explicitly fertility,generation, and of course death. The overwhelmingmana of women, coupled with the high mortalitywhich went along with childbirth, could well have ledto practices of protection, segregation, and slowlyincreasing social restriction. With pregnancy as theone inevitable in a woman’s life, men began to organizesocial life in a way which excluded woman, which limitedher to the living out of her reproductive function.

Androgyny: The Mythological Model 167As men began to know power, that power directly relatedto the exclusion o f women from community life,the myth o f feminine evil developed and provided justificationfor laws, rites, and other practices which relegatedwomen to pieces o f property. As a corollary,men developed the taste for subjugating others andhoarding power and wealth which characterizes themto this very day.Returning to yin and yang, what is crucial is therealization that these concepts did not originally attachto sex. In more concrete terms, the Great Original (firstbeing) o f the Chinese chronicles is the holy woman T ’aiYuan, who was an androgyne, a combined manifestationo f yin and yang. Primacy is given to the feminineprinciple here (the gender of the noun is feminine) becauseo f woman’s generative function.Among the Tibetan Buddhists, the so-called malefemalepolarities are called yabyum; among the IndianHindus, they are called Shiva and Shakti. In the Tantricsects o f both traditions, one finds a living religious cultattached to the myth o f a primal androgyne, to theunion o f male and female. One also finds, not surprisingly,that Tantric cults are condemned by the parentculture with which they identify. The culminating religiousrite of the Tantrics is sacramental fucking, theritual union of man and woman which achieves, even ifonly symbolically, the original androgynous energy.This is the outstanding fact when one looks at yabyumand Shiva-Shakti:The Hindu assigned the male symbol apparatus to thepassive, the female to the active pole; the Buddhist did

168 Woman Hatingthe opposite; the Hindu assigned the knowledge principleto the passive male pole, and the dynamic principleto the active female pole; the Vajrayana Buddhistdid it the other way around. 5The explanation for this major difference, this attachmentin one case of the feminine to the passive and inthe other of the feminine to the active, is that theseattachments were made arbitrarily. 6 Two convictionsvital to sexist ontology are undermined: that everywherethe feminine is synonymous with the passive,receptive, etc., and so it must be true; that the definitionof the feminine as passive, receptive, etc., comesfrom the visible, incontrovertible fact of feminine passivity,receptivity, etc.In Hindu mythology, as opposed to Judaic mythology,the phenomenological world is not created bygod as something distinct from him. It is the godheadin manifestation. As Campbell describes it: “. . . theimage of the androgynous ancestor is developed interms of an essentially psychological reading of theproblem of creation. ” 7 In a description of that androgynousbeing, we find: “He was just as large as a man andwoman embracing. This Self then divided himself intotwo parts; and with that there was a master and amistress. Therefore this body, by itself, as the sageYajnavalkya declares, is like half of a split pea. ” 8In Egypt one of the earliest forms of moon deity wasIsis-Net, an androgyne. The Greek Artemis was androgynous.So is Awonawilona, chief god of the PuebloZuni. The Greek god Eros was also androgynous.Plato, repeating a corrupted version of a much

Androgyny: The Mythological Model 169older myth, describes in Symposium 3 types o f originalhuman beings: male/male, male/female, female/female. These original humans were so powerful thatthe gods feared them and so Zeus, whose own androgynousancestry did not stop him from becoming theMacho Kid, halved them.The Aranda o f Australia know a supernatural beingcalled Numbakulla, “Eternal, ” who made androgynesas the first beings, then split them apart, then tied themback together with hemp to make couples. It is essentiallythis story that is repeated throughout the primitiveworld.Certain African and Melanesian tribes have ancestralimages o f one being with breasts, penis, and beard.Hindu statues which show Shiva and Shakti united participatein the same devotional tradition —we perceivethat they are united in sexual intercourse, but it isalso possible that they represent one literal androgynousbody.There are still devotional religious practices whichharken back to the mythology o f the primal androgyne— Tantra, for instance, in both its Tibetan and Indianmanifestations, clearly participates in that tradition.Possibly the rite o f subincision, practiced in Australia,is similarly rooted in androgyne myth. Subincision is theritual slitting open of the underside of the penis to forma permanent cleft into the urethra. The opening iscalled the “penis womb. ” Campbell notes that “Thesubincision produces artificially a hypospadias resemblingthat o f a certain class o f hermaphrodites. ” 9The drive back to androgyny, where it is manifest, issacral, strong, compelling. It is interesting here to

170 Woman Halingspeculate on the incest taboo. The Freudian articulationof what the Oedipal complex is and means serves theimperatives of a patriarchal culture, of Judeo-Christianmorality, and remains largely unchallenged. Butthe earliest devotional mother-son configurations arethose of a Mother/Goddess and her Son/Lover. Theson is lover to the mother and is ritually sacrificed at apredetermined time (mothers don’t have to be possessive).This sacrifice is not related to guilt or punishment—itis holy sacrifice which sanctifies the tribe, doeshonor to the offering, and is premised on cyclic fertilitypatterns of life, death, and regeneration. Theserites, associated with the worship of the Great Mother(the first corruption of the Great Original, or primalandrogyne) involved ritual intercourse between motherand son, with the subsequent sacrifice of the son. Atone time both a son and a daughter were sacrificed, butas the daughter became a mother-surrogate, the sonwas sacrificed alone. This sacralized set, Mother/Goddess-Son/Lover,and the rituals associated with it, arepostandrogyne developments: that is, men and womenexperienced separateness (not duality) and attemptedto recreate symbolically the androgynous state of mindand body through what we now call incest. If it is truethat the implications of the androgyny myths in termsof behavior run counter to every Judeo-Christian, ormore generally sexist, notion of morality, it would followthat incest is the primary taboo of this and similarcultures because it has its roots in the sexually dynamicandrogynous mentality. Indeed, it is not surprisingto discover that early versions of the Oedipus story donot end with Oedipus putting his eyes out. Sophocles

Androgyny: The Mythological Model 171leaves Oedipus overcome with fear, guilt, and remorse,blinded and ruined. In the earlier Homeric version,Oedipus becomes king and reigns happily ever after.Freud chose the wrong version o f the right story.Even Jewish mythology provides a primal androgyne.Here is the substance o f a cultural undergroundmost directly related to us. According to the Zohar,the first created woman was not Eve but Lilith. She wascreated coterminous with Adam, that is, they werecreated in one body, androgynous. They were o f onesubstance, one corporality. God, so the legend goes,split them apart so that Lilith could be dressed as a brideand married to Adam properly, but Lilith rebelled atthe whole concept o f marriage,, that is, o f being definedas Adam’s inferior, and fled. Lilith was in factthe first woman and the first feminist both. The Jewishpatriarchs, with shrewd vengeance, called her a witch.They said that the witch Lilith haunted the night (hername is etymologically associated with the Hebrewword for night) and killed infants. She became symbolicof the dark, evil side o f all women. O f course, Lilith,we know now, made the correct analysis and went to thecore o f the problem: she rejected the nuclear family.God, however, saw it differently — he had created Lilithfrom dust, just as he had created Adam. He had createdher free and equal. Not making the same mistaketwice, Eve was created from Adam's rib, clearly givingher no claim to either freedom or equality. It took theChristians to assert that since the rib is bent, woman’snature is contrary to man’s.How then can we understand the biblical statementthat God created man in his own image —male and fe­

172 Woman Halingmale created he them? The Midrash gives the definitiveanswer: When the Holy One, Blessed Be He, createdthe first man, he created him androgynous. 10 There is alsoa corresponding Jewish androgynous godhead. Thevery word for the godhead, Elohim, is composed of afeminine noun and a masculine plural ending. Godis multiple and androgynous. The tradition of theandrogynous godhead is most clearly articulated in theKabbalah, a text which in written form goes back to theMiddle Ages. The oral Kabbalah, which is more extensivethan the written Kabbalah, originates in themost obscure reaches of Jewish history, before theBible, and has been preserved with, according to occultists,more care than the written Bible —that is, theBible has been rewritten, edited, modified, translated;oral Kabbalah has retained its purity.The Kabbalistic scheme of the godhead is complex.Suffice it here to say that god is male and female interwoven.Certain parts are associated with the female,other parts with the male. For instance, primal understandingis female; wisdom is male; severity is female;mercy is male. Special prominence is given to the finalemanation of the godhead, Malkuth the Queen, thephysical manifestation of the godhead in the universe.Malkuth the Queen is roughly equivalent to Shakti. Forthe Kabbalists, as for the Tantrics, the ultimate sacramentis sexual intercourse which recreates androgyny.Just as the Tantrics are/were ostracized by the rest ofthe Hindu and Buddhist communities, so do the mainbody of Jews ostracize the Kabbalists. Now they areconsidered to be freaks —they have been viewed asheretics. And heretics they are, for in recognizing the

Androgyny: The Mythological Model 173androgynous nature o f the godhead they underminethe authority o f God the Father and threaten the powero f patriarchy.It remains only to point out that Christ also hadsome notion o f androgyny. In Gospel to the Egyptians,Christ and a disciple named Salome have this conversation:When Salome asked how long Death should prevail,the Lord said: So long as ye women bear children; forI have come to destroy the work o f the Female. AndSalome said to Him: Did I therefore well in havingno children? The Lord answered and said: Eat everyHerb, but eat not that which hath bitterness. WhenSalome asked when these things about which she questionedwould be made known, the Lord said: When yetrample upon the garment o f shame; when the Twobecome One, and Male with Female neither male norfemale. 11In the next chapter I am going to pursue the implicationsof androgyny myths in the areas of sexualidentity and sexual behavior, and it would be in keepingwith the spirit of this book to take Christ as my guideand say with him: “When ye trample upon the garmento f shame; when the Two become One, and Male withFemale neither male nor female. ”

CHAPTER 9Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking,and CommunityNothing short of everything will really do.Aldous Huxley, IslandThe discovery is, of course, that “man” and “woman”are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As modelsthey are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to humanbecoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to thefemale, dead-ended for male and female both. Cultureas we know it legislates those fictive roles as normalcy.Deviations from sanctioned, sacred behavior are “genderdisorders, ” “criminality, ” as well as “sick, ” “disgusting,” and “immoral. ” Heterosexuality, which isproperly defined as the ritualized behavior built onpolar role definition, and the social institutions relatedto it (marriage, the family, the Church, ad infinitum)are “human nature. ” Homosexuality, transsexuality,incest, and bestiality persist as the “perversions” of this“human nature” we presume to know so much about.They persist despite the overwhelming forces marshaledagainst them —discriminatory laws and socialpractices, ostracism, active persecution by the stateand other organs of the culture —as inexplicable embarrassments,as odious examples of “filth” and/or“maladjustment. ” The attempt here, however modest174

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community 175and incomplete, is to discern another ontology, onewhich discards the fiction that there are two polardistinct sexes.We have seen that androgyny myths present animage o f one corporality which is both male and female.Sometimes the image is literally a man-form and awoman-form in one body. Sometimes it is a figurewhich incorporates both male and female functions.In every case, that mythological image is a paradigmfor a wholeness, a harmony, and a freedom which isvirtually unimaginable, the antithesis o f every assumptionwe hold about the nature o f identity in generaland sex in particular. The first question then is: Whato f biology? There are, after all, men and women. Theyare different, demonstrably so. We are each o f one sexor the other. If there are two discrete biological sexes,then it is not hard to argue that there are two discretemodes o f human behavior, sex-related, sex-determined.One might argue for a liberalization of sex-based roles,but one cannot justifiably argue for their total redefinition.Hormone and chromosome research, attempts todevelop new means o f human reproduction (life createdin, or considerably supported by, the scientist’slaboratory), work with transsexuals, and studies offormation o f gender identity in children provide basicinformation which challenges the notion that there aretwo discrete biological sexes. That information threatensto transform the traditional biology o f sex differenceinto the radical biology o f sex similarity. That is not tosay that there is one sex, but that there are many. The

176 Woman Halingevidence which is germane here is simple. The words“male” and “female, ” “man” and “woman, ” are usedonly because as yet there are no others.1. Men and women have the same basic body structure.Both have both male and female genitals —theclitoris is a vestigial penis, the prostate gland is mostprobably a vestigial womb. Since, as I pointed out earlier,there is information on only 2 percent of humanhistory, and since religious chronicles, which were forcenturies the only record of human history, consistentlyspeak of another time in the cycle of time when humanswere androgynous, and since each sex has the vestigialorgans of the other, there is no reason not to postulatethat humans once were androgynous — hermaphroditicand androgynous, created precisely in the image ofthat constantly recurring androgynous godhead.2. Until the 7th week of fetal development bothsexes have precisely the same external genitalia. Basically,the development of sex organs and ducts is thesame for males and females and the same two sets ofducts develop in both.3. The gonads cannot be said to be entirely male orfemale. Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey writes:In their somatic organization, the gonads always retaina greater or lesser amount of the opposite-sex tissuewhich remains functional throughout life. 14. Chromosomal sex is not necessarily the visiblesex of the individual. It happens that a person of one

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community 177chromosomal sex develops the gonads o f the other sex. *Gonadal sex and chromosomal sex can be in direct contradiction.5. Chromosomal sex is not only XX or XY. Thereare other chromosomal formations, and not much isknown about them or what they signify.6. A person can have the gonads o f one sex, and thesecondary sexual characteristics o f the other sex.7. Men and women both produce male and femalehormones. The amounts and proportions vary greatly,and there is no way to determine biological malenessor femaleness from hormone count.8. One hormone can be transformed by the bodyinto its “opposite, ” male into female, female intomale. In Sex, Gender, and Society, Ann Oakley gives thisexample:. . . the fact that rapidly maturing male adolescentssometimes acquire small breasts —the substantial increasesin testosterone which accompanies puberty[are] partially metabolised as oestrogen, which in turncauses breast development. 29. It is now thought that the male hormone determinesthe sex drive in both men and women.* Question: Can a person with the chromosomal sex o f a male and thegonadal sex o f a female conceive? If so, we would have to accept the notionthat men can have children. I would think that such cases do exist in nature,even though I could find no confirmation that such persons are ferule. Sinceanyone who has children is defined as a woman, and chromosome tests arenot done routinely, such persons would probably not be discovered exceptby accident.

178 Woman Hating10. The female hormone (progesterone) can have amasculinizing effect. Dr. Sherfey writes:We may have difficulty conceiving it, but natural selectionhas no difficulty using sexually heterotypicstructures for homotypic purposes. For example,progesterone is the “pregnancy hormone” essentialfor menstruation and the prolonged pregnancy. It is asuniquely a “female” hormone as one can be. Yet progesteronepossesses strong androgenic properties. Itmay be used to masculinize female embryos. In 1 960,Jones (27, 63) demonstrated that progesterone givento human mothers early in pregnancy to preventthreatened miscarriages. . . severely masculinized afemale fetus. 311. Visible sex differences are not discrete. Thereare men with tiny cocks, women with large clits. Thereare men with highly developed breasts, women withalmost no breast development. There are men withwide hips, women with no noticeable hip development.There are men with virtually no body hair, women withmuch body hair. There are men with high voices,women with low voices. There are men with no facialhair, women who have beards and mustaches.12. Height and weight differences between men andwomen are not discrete. Muscle structures are not discrete.We know the despair of the tall, muscular womanwho does not fit the female stereotype; we know alsothe despair of the small, delicate man who does notfit the male stereotype.13. There is compelling cross-cultural evidence thatmuscle strength and development are culturally deter-

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community 179mined. There are cultures in which there are no greatdifferences in somatotype o f men and women:In one small-scale (“primitive”) society for which thereare good photographic records —the Manus of theAdmiralty Islands — there is apparently no difference atall in somatotype between males and females as children,and as adults both men and women tend to thesame high degree of mesomorphy (broad shouldersand chest, heavily muscled limbs, little subcutaneousfat).. . . In Bali, too, males and females lack the sortof differentiation of the physique that is a visible differencein our culture. Geoffrey Gorer once describedthem as a “hermaphroditic” people; they have littlesex differential in height and both sexes have broadshoulders and narrow hips. They do not run to curvesand muscles, to body hair or to breasts of any size.(Gorer once remarked that you could not tell male andfemale apart, even from the front. ) Another sourceinforms us that babies suck their fathers' breasts aswell as their mothers'. 414. There are hermaphrodites in nature. Robert T.Francoeur, in Utopian Motherhood: New Trends in HumanReproduction, admits:The medical profession and experimental biologistshave always been very skeptical about the existence offunctional hermaphrodites among the higher animalsand man, though the earthworm, the sea hare, andother lower animals do combine both sexes in the sameindividual. 5We have seen how deep the commitment to human sexualdiscreteness and polarity goes —that commitment

180 Woman Hatingmakes the idea of functional hermaphroditism conceptuallyintolerable. It is interesting here to speculateon the perceptions of men like Lionel Tiger (Men inGroups) who in effect project human cultural patternsof dominance and submission on the animal world. Forinstance, Dr. Sherfey tells us that “In many primatespecies, the females would be diagnosed hermaphrodites ifthey were human” (Italics hers. ) 6Most probably, we oftensimply project our own culturally determined modes ofacting and perceiving onto other animals —we effectivelyscreen information that would challenge thenotions of male and female which are holy to us. Inthat case, a bias toward androgyny (instead of the currentbias toward polarity) would give us significantlydifferent scenarios of animal behavior.Hermaphroditism is generally defined as “a congenitaldisorder in which both male and female generativeorgans exist in the same individual. ” 7 A “true”hermaphrodite is one who has ovaries, testes, and thesecondary sexual characteristics of both sexes. Butthis is, it seems to me, the story of a functional hermaphrodite:The case involved a sixteen-year-old Arkansas girlwho was being operated on for an ovarian tumor. Asis the custom in such surgery, the tissue removed iscarefully examined by a pathologist. In this instance,signs of live eggs and live sperm were found in differentregions of the tumor. With the egg and the sperm situatedright next to each other in the same organ, Dr.Timme claimed “there was a great possibility that theywould combine and make a human being. ”. . . Theunique feature. . . would be that the same personcontributed both germ cells. 8

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community 181Parthenogenesis also occurs naturally in women. Francoeurrefers to the work o f Dr. Landrum B. Shettleswhoin examining human eggs just after they were removedfrom their ovarian follicles. . . found that three outof four hundred of these eggs had “undergone cleavagein vivo within the intact follicle, without any possiblecontact with spermatozoa. ” 9On the basis o f Shettles’ work, Francoeur estimatesthat virgin births are a rather common occurrence,in about the same frequency as fraternal twins andtwice as often as identical twins occur among whiteAmericans. 10Seemingly a conservative, Dr. Sherwood Taylor, aBritish scientist, “has suggested a much lower frequencyfor human parthenogenesis, estimating one case in tenthousand births. ” 11 However much, however little, itdoes occur.We can presume then that there is a great deal abouthuman sexuality to be discovered, and that our notionof two discrete biological sexes cannot remain intact. Wecan presume then that we will discover cross-sexedphenomena in proportion to our ability to see them. Inaddition, we can account for the relative rarity of hermaphroditesin the general population, for the consistencyo f male-female somatotypes that we do find,and for the relative rarity of cross-sexed characteristicsin the general population (though they occurwith more frequency than we are now willing to imagine)by recognizing that there is a process of cultural selec­

182 Woman Hatingtion which, for people, supersedes natural selection inimportance. Cultural selection, as opposed to naturalselection, does not necessarily serve to improve thespecies or to ensure survival. It does necessarily serveto uphold cultural norms and to ensure that deviantsomatotypes and cross-sexed characteristics are systematicallybred out of the population.However we look at it, whatever we choose to makeout of the data of what is frequently called Intersex, itis clear that sex determination is not always clearcutand simple. Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins Universityhas basically isolated these six aspects of sexidentity:1. Genetic or nuclear sexuality as revealed by indicatorslike the sex-chromatin or Barr-body, a full chromosomalcount and the leucocytic drumstick; *2. Hormonal sexuality which results from a balance thatis predominantly androgenic or estrogenic;3. Gonadal sexuality which may be clearly ovarian ortesticular, but occasionally also mixed;4. Internal sexuality as disclosed in the structure ofthe internal reproductive system;5. External genital sexuality as revealed in the externalanatomy, and finally;6. Psychosexual development which through the externalforces of rearing and social conditioning along withthe individual's response to these factors directs thedevelopment of a personality which is by naturesexual. 12* An object in the cell itself which would seem to determine gender.

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community 183Since there can be total contradiction between/among any o f the above, since we have discussed some(by no means all) o f the cross-sexed characteristics o fhuman biological functioning, since we recognize hermaphroditismand parthenogenesis as human realities,we are justified in making a radical new formulation ofthe nature o f human sexuality. We are, clearly, a multisexedspecies which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluidcontinuum where the elements called male and female arenot discrete *The concrete implications of multisexuality as wefind it articulated in both androgynous mythology andbiology necessitate the total redefinition o f scenarios ofproper human sexual behavior and pragmatic formso f human community. If human beings are multisexed,then all forms o f sexual interaction which are directlyrooted in the multisexual nature o f people must be parto f the fabric o f human life, accepted into the lexicon ofhuman possibility, integrated into the forms of humancommunity. By redefining human sexuality, or bydefining it correctly, we can transform human relationshipand the institutions which seek to control that relationship.Sex as the power dynamic between men andwomen, its primary form sadomasochism, is what weknow now. Sex as community between humans, ourshared humanity, is the world we must build. What* T he notion o f bisexuality is organically rooted to structural polarityand is inappropriate here for these reasons: the word itself has duality builtinto it; one can be bisexual and still relate to the fictions “male” and “female"— to both instead o f to one; one can be bisexual and still relate exclusively toone role, the masculine or the feminine, whether found in men or women.

184 Woman Halingkind of sexual identity and relation will be the substanceof that community?Heterosexuality and Homosexuality/There are men I could spend eternity with,But not this life.Kathleen Norrisa little zen in our politics a little acid inour tea, could be all we need, the poofis in the putting.Jill JohnstonI have defined heterosexuality as the ritualizedbehavior built on polar role definition. Intercoursewith men as we know them is increasingly impossible.It requires an aborting of creativity and strength, arefusal of responsibility and freedom: a bitter personaldeath. It means remaining the victim, forever annihilatingall self-respect. It means acting out the female role,incorporating the masochism, self-hatred, and passivitywhich are central to it. Unambiguous conventionalheterosexual behavior is the worst betrayal of our commonhumanity.That is not to say that “men” and “women” shouldnot fuck. Any sexual coming together which is genuinelypansexual and role-free, even if between men andwomen as we generally think of them (i. e., the biologicalimages we have of them), is authentic and androgynous.Specifically, androgynous fucking requires the destruction* For bisexuality, cf. p. 183.

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community 185of all conventional role-playing, of genital sexuality as theprimary focus and value, of couple formations, and of thepersonality structures dominant-active (“ male”) and submissive-passive(“female”).Homosexuality, because it is by definition antagonisticto two-sex polarity, is closer at its inceptionto androgynous sexuality. However, since all individualconsciousness and social relationship are polluted byinternalized notions o f polarity, coupling, and roleplaying,the criteria cited above must also be applied tohomosexual relation. Too often homosexual relationtransgresses gender imperatives without transformingthem.An exclusive commitment to one sexual formation,whether homosexual or heterosexual, generally meansan exclusive commitment to one role. An exclusivecommitment to one sexual formation generally involvesthe denial o f many profound and compellingkinds o f sensuality. An exclusive commitment to onesexual formation generally means that one is, regardlesso f the uniform one wears, a good soldier o f theculture programmed effectively to do its dirty work.It is by developing one’s pansexuality to its limits(and no one knows where or what those are) that onedoes the work of destroying culture to build community.TranssexualityHow can I really care if we win “the Revolution”?Either way, any way, there will beno place for me.A transsexual friend, in a conversation

186 Woman HalingTranssexuality is currently considered a genderdisorder, that is, a person learns a gender role whichcontradicts his/her visible sex. It is a “disease” witha cure: a sex-change operation will change the person’svisible sex and make it consonant with the person’s feltidentity.Since we know very little about sex identity, andsince psychiatrists are committed to the propagationof the cultural structure as it is, it would be prematureand not very intelligent to accept the psychiatric judgmentthat transsexuality is caused by faulty socialization.More probably transsexuality is caused by a faulty society.Transsexuality can be defined as one particularformation of our general multisexuality which is unableto achieve its natural development because of extremelyadverse social conditions.There is no doubt that in the culture of male-femalediscreteness, transsexuality is a disaster for the individualtranssexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man,woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency(see p. 185) as a transsexual. There are 3 crucialpoints here. One, every transsexual has the right tosurvival on his/her own terms. That means that everytranssexual is entitled to a sex-change operation,and it should be provided by the community as one ofits functions. This is an emergency measure for anemergency condition. Two, by changing our premisesabout men and women, role-playing, and polarity, thesocial situation of transsexuals will be transformed,and transsexuals will be integrated into community, nolonger persecuted and despised. Three, communitybuilt on androgynous identity will mean the end of

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community 187transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual willbe able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny,or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon o f transsexualitywill disappear and that energy will be transformedinto new modes of sexual identity and behavior.TransvestismThe first time I put on the black silkpanties I got a hardon right away.Julian BeckTransvestism is costuming which violates genderimperatives. Transvestism is generally a sexuallycharged act: the visible, public violation o f sex role iserotic, exciting, dangerous. It is a kind o f erotic civildisobedience, and that is precisely its value. Costumingis part of the strategy and process o f role destruction.We see, for instance, that as women reject the femalerole, they adopt “male” clothing. As sex roles dissolve,the particular erotic content o f transvestism dissolves.Bestiality[In the Middle Ages] copulation with aJew was regarded as a form of bestiality,and incurred the same penances.G. Rattray-Taylor, Sex in HistoryPrimary bestiality (fucking between people andother animals) is found in all nonindustrial societies.Secondary bestiality (generalized erotic relationshipsbetween people and other animals) is found everywhere

188 Woman Hatingon the planet, on every city street, in every rural town.Bestiality is an erotic reality, one which clearly placespeople in nature, not above it.The relationship between people and other animals,when nonpredatory, is always erotic since its substanceis nonverbal communication and touch. That eroticismin its pure form is life-affirming and life-enriching wassufficient reason to make bestiality a capital crime inthe Dark Ages, at least for the nonhuman animal; sufficientreason for the English in the Dark Ages to confusesheep and Jews.In contemporary society relationships betweenpeople and other animals often reflect the sadomasochisticcomplexion of human relationship. Animalsin our culture are often badly abused, the objects ofviolence and cruelty, the foil of repressed and thereforevery dangerous human sexuality. Some animals, likehorses and big dogs, become surrogate cocks, symbolsof ideal macho virility.Needless to say, in androgynous community, humanand other-animal relationships would become moreexplicitly erotic, and that eroticism would not degenerateinto abuse. Animals would be part of the tribeand, with us, respected, loved, and free. They alwaysshare our fate, whatever it is.IncestI was cold —later revolted a little, notmuch — seemed perhaps a good idea to try— know the Monster of the BeginningWomb—Perhaps —that way. Would shecare? She needs a lover.Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community 189The parent-child relationship is primarily eroticbecause all human relationships are primarily erotic.The incest taboo is a particularized form of repression,one which functions as the bulwark o f all the other repressions.The incest taboo ensures that however freewe become, we never become genuinely free. The incesttaboo, because it denies us essential fulfillment with theparents whom we love with our primary energy, forcesus to internalize those parents and constantly seek them,or seek to negate them, in the minds, bodies, and heartso f other humans who are not our parents and neverwill be.The incest taboo does the worst work o f the culture:it teaches us the mechanisms of repressing and internalizingerotic feeling—it forces us to develop thosemechanisms in the first place; it forces us to particularizesexual feeling, so that it congeals into a needfor a particular sexual “object” ; it demands that weplace the nuclear family above the human family. Thedestruction o f the incest taboo is essential to the developmento f cooperative human community based onthe free-flow o f natural androgynous eroticism.The FamilyFor if we grant that the sexual drive is atbirth diffuse and undifferentiated from thetotal personality (Freud’s “polymorphousperversity”) and. . . becomes differentiatedonly in response to the incest taboo;and that. . . the incest taboo is now necessaryonly in order to preserve the family;then if we did away with the family wewould in effect be doing away with the

190 Woman Hatingrepressions that mold sexuality into specificformations.Shulamith Firestone,The Dialectic o f SexThe incest taboo can be destroyed only by destroyingthe nuclear family as the primary institution of theculture. The nuclear family is the school of values in asexist, sexually repressed society. One learns what onemust know: the roles, rituals, and behaviors appropriateto male-female polarity and the internalized mechanismsof sexual repression. The alternative to the nuclearfamily at the moment is the extended family,or tribe. The growth of tribe is part of the process ofdestroying particularized roles and fixed erotic identity.As people develop fluid androgynous identity, theywill also develop the forms of community appropriateto it. We cannot really imagine what those forms willbe.ChildrenThe special tie women have with childrenis recognized by everyone. I submit, however,that the nature of this bond is nomore than shared oppression. And thatmoreover this oppression is intertwinedand mutually reinforcing in such complexways that we will be unable to speak ofthe liberation of women without also discussingthe liberation of children.Shulamith Firestone,The Dialectic o f Sex

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community 191Tw o developments are occurring simultaneously:women are rejecting the female role, and life is beingcreated in the laboratory. Unless the structure is totallytransformed, we can expect that when women no longerfunction as biological breeders we will be expendable.As men learn more and more to control reproduction,as cloning becomes a reality, and as the technology o fcomputers and robots develop, there is every reasonto think that men as we know them will use that controland technology to create the sex objects that willgratify them. Men, after all, nave throughout historyresorted to gynocide as a stratagem o f social control,as a tactical way o f attaining/maintaining power. Thatis the simple, compelling reality. There are only twoother options: women must seize power, or we mustaccomplish the transformation into androgyny.T he freedom o f those who are capable o f biologicalreproduction from that work (which is simply a formo f physical labor) is entirely congruent with androgynouscommunity. Only in the concentration-camp worldo f polarity must one expect that development to lead togynocide. The social processes here stand naked: ifwomen must seize power in order to survive, and somehowmanage to do that, power will most probably shiftwithout being transformed; if we can create androgynouscommunity, we can abandon power altogether asa social reality —that is the final, and most important,implication o f androgyny.As for children, they too are erotic beings, closerto androgyny than the adults who oppress them. Childrenare fully capable o f participating in community,and have every right to live out their own erotic im­

192 Woman Halingpulses. In androgynous community, those impulseswould retain a high degree of nonspecificity and wouldno doubt show the rest of us the way into sexual selfrealization.The distinctions between “children” and“adults, ” and the social institutions which enforce thosedistinctions, would disappear as androgynous communitydevelops.ConclusionNothing short of everything will really do.Aldous Huxley, IslandThe object is cultural transformation. The object isthe development of a new kind of human being and anew kind of human community. All of us who have evertried to right a wrong recognize that truly nothing shortof everything will really do.The way from here to there will not be easy. Wemust make a total commitment —no longer to takerefuge in the scenarios of man-woman violence whichare society’s regulators, no longer to play the malefemaleroles we have been taught, no longer to refuseto know who we are and what we desire so that we neednot take responsibility for our own lives. We mustrefuse to submit to those institutions which are by definitionsexist —marriage, the nuclear family, religionsbuilt on the myth of feminine evil. We must refuse tosubmit to the fears engendered by sexual taboos. Wemust refuse to submit to all forms of behavior and relationshipwhich reinforce male-female polarity, whichnourish basic patterns of male dominance and female

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community 193submission. We must instead build communities whereviolence is not the main dynamic o f human relationship,where natural desire is the fundament o f community,where androgyny is the operative premise, where tribebased on androgyny and the social forms which woulddevelop from it are the bases o f the collective culturalstructure —noncoercive, nonsexist. As Julian Beckwrote, the journey to love is not romantic. As many havewritten, the journey to freedom is not romantic either —nor is the way known precisely and for all time. Webegin here and now, inch by inch.

You do not teach someone to count onlyup to eight. You do not say nine and tenand beyond do not exist. You give peopleeverything or they are not able to count atall. There is a real revolution or none atall.Pericles Korovessis, in an interviewin Liberation, June 1973

The Revolution is not an event that takestwo or three days, in which there is shootingand hanging. It is a long drawn outprocess in which new people are created,capable of renovating society so that therevolution does not replace one elite withanother, but so that the revolution createsa new anti-authoritarian structure withanti-authoritarian people who in theirturn re-organize the society so that it becomesa non-alienated human society, freefrom war, hunger, and exploitation.Rudi Dutschke, March 7, 1968

There is a misery of the body and a miseryof the mind, and if the stars, whenever welooked at them, poured nectar into ourmouths, and the grass became bread, wewould still be sad. We live in a system thatmanufactures sorrow, spilling it out of itsmill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm,and we drown down, dead, too soon.. . . uprising is the reversal of the system,and revolution is the turning of tides.Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

AFTERWORDThe Great Punctuation Typography Strugglethis text has been altered in one very serious way. Iwanted it to be printed the way it was written —lowercase letters, no apostrophes, contractions.I like my text to be as empty as possible, only necessarypunctuation is necessary, when one knows onespurposes one knows what is necessary.my publisher, in his corporate wisdom, filled thepages with garbage: standard punctuation, he knew hispurposes; he knew what was necessary, our purposesdiffered: mine, to achieve clarity; his, to sell books.my publisher changed my punctuation because bookreviewers (Mammon) do not like lower case letters,fuck (in the old sense) book reviewers (Mammon).When I say god and mammon concerning thewriter writing, I mean that any one can use words tosay something. And in using these words to say whathe has to say he may use those words directly or indirectly.If he uses these words indirectly he says whathe intends to have heard by somebody who is to hearand in so doing inevitably he has to serve mammon.. . .Now serving god for a writer who is writing is writinganything directly, it makes no difference what it is but197

198 Woman Hatingit must be direct, the relation between the thing doneand the doer must be direct. In this way there is completionand the essence of the completed thing is completion.Gertrude Steinin a letter to me, Grace Paley wrote, “once everyonetells the truth artists will be unnecessary —meanwhilethere’s work for us. ”telling the truth, we know what it is when we do itand when we learn not to do it we forget what it is.form, shape, structure, spatial relation, how theprinted word appears on the page, where to breathe,where to rest, punctuation is marking time, indicatingrhythms, even in my original text I used too much of it— I overorchestrated. I forced you to breathe where Ido, instead of letting you discover your own naturalbreath.I begin by presuming that I am free.I begin with nothing, no form, no content, and I ask:what do I want to do and how do I want to do it.I begin by presuming that what I write belongs tome.I begin by presuming that I determine the form Iuse —in all its particulars. I work at my craft —in allits particulars.in fact, everything is already determined,in fact, all the particulars have been determined andare enforced.in fact, where I violate what has already been determinedI will be stopped.in fact, the enforcers will enforce.

Afterword 199“Whatever he may seem to us, he is yet a servant of theLaw; that is, he belongs to the Law and as such is setbeyond human judgment. In that case one dare notbelieve that the doorkeeper is subordinate to the man.Bound as he is by his service, even at the door of theLaw, he is incomparably freer than anyone at large inthe world. The man is only seeking the Law, the doorkeeperis already attached to it. It is the Law that hasplaced him at his post; to doubt his integrity is to doubtthe Law itself. ”“I don't agree with that point of view, ” said K.,shaking his head, “for if one accepts it, one must acceptas true everything the doorkeeper says. But you yourselfhave sufficiently proved how impossible it is to dothat. ”“No, ” said the priest, “it is not necessary to accepteverything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.”“A melancholy conclusion, ” said K. “It turns lyinginto a universal principle. ”Franz KafkaI presume that I am free. I act. the enforcers enforce.I discover that I am not free, then: either I lie(it is necessary to lie) or I struggle (if I do not lie, Imust struggle), if I struggle, I ask, why am I not freeand what can I do to become free? I wrote this book tofind out why I am not free and what I can do to becomefree.Though the social structure begins by framing thenoblest laws and the loftiest ordinances that “the greatof the earth” have devised, in the end it comes to this:breach that lofty law and they take you to a prison celland shut your human body off from human warmth.

200 Woman HatingUltimately the law is enforced by the unfeeling guardpunching his fellow man hard in the belly.Judith Malinawithout the presumption o f freedom , there is nofreedom . I am free, how, then, do I want to live mylife, do my work, use my body? how, then, do I want tobe, in all my particulars?standard forms are imposed in dress, behavior,sexual relation, punctuation. standard form s are imposedon consciousness and behavior—on knowing andexpressing— so that we will not presume freedom , sothat freedom will appear —in all its particulars — impossibleand unworkable, so that we will not know whattelling the truth is, so that we will not feel compelledto tell it, so that we will spend our time and our holyhuman energy telling the necessary lies.standard forms are sometimes called conventions,conventions are mightier than armies, police, and prisons.each citizen becomes the enforcer, the doorkeeper,an instrument o f the Law, an unfeeling guard punchinghis fellow man hard in the belly.I am an anarchist. I dont sue, I dont get injunctions, Iadvocate revolution, and when people ask me whatcan we do that’s practical, I say, weakly, weaken thefabric of the system wherever you can, make possiblethe increase of freedom, all kinds. When I write Itry to extend the possibilities of expression.. . . I had tried to speak to you honestly, in my ownway, undisguised, trying to get rid, it’s part of my obligationto the muse, of the ancien regime of grammar.. . . the revisions in typography and punctuationhave taken from the voice the difference that distin­

Afterword 201guishes passion from affection and me speaking toyou from me writing an essay.Julian Beck, 1965, in a forewordto an edition of The BrigBELIEVE THE PUNCTUATION.Muriel Rukeyserthere is a great deal at stake here, many writersfight this battle and most lose it. what is at stake forthe writer? freedom o f invention, freedom to tell thetruth, in all its particulars, freedom to imagine newstructures.(the burden o f proof is not on those who presumefreedom, the burden o f proof is on those who wouldin any way diminish it. )what is at stake for the enforcers, the doorkeepers,the guardians o f the Law —the publishing corporations,the book reviewers who do not like lower case letters,the librarians who will not stack books without standardpunctuation (that was the reason given Muriel Rukeyserwhen her work was violated)—what is at stake for them?why do they continue to enforce?while this book may meet much resistance—anger,fear, dislike—law? police? courts? —at this moment Imust write: Ive attacked the fundaments o f culture,thats ok. Ive attacked male dominance, thats ok. Iveattacked every heterosexual notion o f relation, thatsok. Ive in effect advocated the use o f drugs, thats ok.Ive in effect advocated fucking animals, thats ok. hereand now, New York City, spring 1974, among a handfulo f people, publisher and editor included, thats ok. lowercase letters are not. it does make one wonder.

202 Woman Hatingso Ive wondered and this is what I think right now.there are well-developed, effective mechanisms fordealing with ideas, no matter how powerful the ideasare. very few ideas are more powerful than the mechanismsfor defusing them, standard form —punctuation,typography, then on to academic organization, therigid ritualistic formulation of ideas, etc. —is the actualdistance between the individual (certainly the intellectualindividual) and the ideas in a book.standard form is the distance.one can be excited about ideas without changing atall. one can think about ideas, talk about ideas, withoutchanging at all. people are willing to think about manythings, what people refuse to do, or are not permitted todo, or resist doing, is to change the way they think.reading a text which violates standard form forcesone to change mental sets in order to read. there is nodistance. the new form, which is in some ways unfamiliar,forces one to read differendy—not to read aboutdifferent things, but to read in different ways.to permit writers to use forms which violate conventionjust might permit writers to develop forms whichwould teach people to think differently: not to thinkabout different things, but to think in different ways.that work is not permitted.If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babelwithout ascending it, the work would have been permitted.Franz KafkaThe Immovable Structure is the villain. Whetherthat structure calls itself a prison or a school or a fac­

Afterword 203tory or a family or a government or The World As ItIs. That structure asks each man what he can do for it,not what it can do for him, and for those who do not dofor it, there is the pain of death or imprisonment, orsocial degradation, or the loss of animal rights.Judith Malinathis book is about the Immovable Sexual Structure,in the process o f having it published, Ive encounteredthe Immovable Punctuation Typography Structure,and I now testify, as so many have before me, that theImmovable Structure aborts freedom, prohibits invention,and does us verifiable harm: it uses our holy humanenergy to sustain itself; it turns us into enforcers,or outlaws; to survive, we must learn to lie.The Revolution, as we live it and as we imagine it,means destroying the Immovable Structure to createa world in which we can use our holy human energy tosustain our holy human lives;to create a world without enforcers, doorkeepers,guards, and arbitrary Law;to create a world —a community on this planet—where instead o f lying to survive, we can tell the truthand flourish.

NOTESChapter 1. Onceuponatime: The Roles1The Brothers G rim m , Household Stories (New York: DoverPublications, 1963), p. 213.2 Ibid., p. 213.3 Ibid., p. 214.4 Ibid.5Ibid.6 Ibid.7Ibid., p. 216.8 Ibid., p. 221.9 Ibid.10 Ibid.II Ibid., p. 124.12 Ibid., p. 72.13 Ibid., p. 73.14 Ibid.15 Ibid., p. 74.16 Ibid., p. 8517 Ibid., p. 220.18Ibid., p. 85.19 Ibid., p. 92.Chapter 3. Woman as Victim: Story of O1 Newsweek, March 21, 1966, p. 108, unsigned.- Pauline Reage, Story o f O (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. xxi.3Ibid., p. 80.

206 Woman Haling4 Ibid., p. 93.5 Ibid., p. 187.6Ibid., p. 32.7 Ibid., p. 106.8 Robert S. de Ropp, Sex Energy: The Sexual Force in Man andAnimals (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1969), p. 134.Chapter 4. Woman at Victim: The Image‘Jean de Berg, The Image (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p.137-2 Ibid., p. 19.3 Ibid., p. 47.4 Ibid.5 Ibid., p. 10.6 Ibid., p. 11.7 Ibid., p. 9.8 Ibid., p. 42.9Eliphas Levi, The History o f Magic (London: Rider and Company,1969), p. 263.10 Ibid., p. 265." J e a n de Berg, op. cit., p. 11.11 Ibid., p. 135.13 The Essential Lenny Bruce, ed. John Cohen (New York: BallantineBooks, 1967), pp. 296-97.Chapter 5. Woman at Victim: Suck1The Essential Lenny Bruce, ed. John Cohen (New York: BallantineBooks, 1967), p. 245.2Anne Severson and Shelby Kennedy, I Change I Am the Same(n. d. ).3Suck 6.4 Ibid.5Suck 4.6 Ibid.7 Ibid.8 Ibid." 7Ibid.19 Suck 2.

11 Ibid.11 Ibid.13Ibid.14Ibid.15Suck 3.Chapter 6. Gynoclde: Chinese FootbindingI Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History o f a CuriousErotic Custom (New York: W. Rawls, 1966), p. 39. Mr. Levy’s book isthe primary source for all the factual, historical information in thischapter.2Ibid., p. 112.3 Ibid., pp. 25-26.4Ibid., p. 26.5 Ibid., pp. 26-28.6 Ibid., p. 141.7Ibid.8 Ibid., p. 182."9Ibid., p. 89.10 Ibid., p. 144.II Ibid., pp. 144- 45-Chapter 7. Gynoclde: The Witches1Jules Michelet, Satanism and Witchcraft (London: Tandem,1969). P- 66.2H. R. Hays, The Dangerous Sex: The Myth o f Feminine Evil (London:Methuen and Co., 1966), p. 111.3Pennethorne Hughes, Witchcraft (Harmondsworth: PenguinBooks, 1971), p. 63.4 Ibid., p. 65.5 Ibid., pp. 66-67.6 Hays, op. cit., p. 147.7 Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum,trans. by M. Summers (London: Arrow Books, 1971), pp. 29-30.8Ibid., Table of Contents.9 Ibid.10Ibid., Preface.11 Hughes, op. cit., pp. 183-84.

208 Woman Hating12 K ram er and Sprenger, op. cit., p. 123.13 Ibid., pp. 114-15.14 Ibid., pp. 115-16.15 Ibid.16 Ibid., p. 117.17 Ibid., p. 118.18 Ibid., pp. 119-21.19 Ibid., p. 112.20 Ibid., pp. 122-23.21 Hays, op. cit., p. 151.22 Ibid., p. 153.23 Ibid.24 Ibid., p. 89.25 T he Holy Bible (Philadelphia: National Bible Press, 1954), p. 8.26 Michelet, op. cit., p. 68.27 K ram er and Sprenger, op. cit., p. 161.28 Hughes, op. cit., pp. 97-98.29 Gillian Tindall, A Handbook on Witches (New York: A theneum ,1966), p. 99.30 H ughes, op. cit., p. 156.31 Ibid., p. 130.Chapter 8. Androgyny: The Mythological Model1M. Esther H arding, Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modem(London: Rider and Company, 1971), pp. 35-36.2 Ibid., p. 36.3 Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter betweenContemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities (New York: H arper ScRow, i960), p. 23.4 The Secret of the Golden Flower, introduction by Richard Wilhelm(London: Routledge, 1962), p. 12.5A gehananda Bharati, The Tantric Tradition (G arden City:Doubleday and Company, 1970), pp. 18-19.6 Ibid., p. 200.7Joseph Campbell, The Masks o f God: Primitive Mythology (NewYork: Viking, 1969), p. 109.8 Ibid., p. 105.9Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 154.

10Midrash, Rabbah, 8: 1.11 Harding, op. cit., pp. 282-83.Notes 209Chapter 9. Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community1 Mary Jane Sherfey, M. D., The Nature and Evolution o f FemaleSexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 43.2Ann Oakley, Sexf Gender and Society (New York: Harper Sc Row,1972), p. 24.3 Sherfey, op. cit., pp. 50-51.4Oakley, op. cit., p. 30.5 Robert T . Francoeur, Utopian Motherhood: New Trends in H umanReproduction (Cranbury, N. J.: A. S. Barnes, 1973), p. 139.6 Sherfey, op. cit., p. 50.7 Ibid., p. 173.8 Francoeur, op. cit., p. 139.9 Ibid., p. 140.10 Ibid.11 Ibid.11 Ibid., p. 197.

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218Grateful acknowledgment is due for permission to quote from the followingcopyright material:From Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre. Copyright G 1972 by Julian Beck.Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.From Jean de Berg, The Image. Copyright © 1966 by Grove Press. Reprinted bypermission of Grove Press, Inc.From Robert T. Francoeur, Utopian Motherhood. Copyright © 1970 by RobertT. Francoeur. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.From Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Malefic arum, translated byMontague Summers. Reprinted by permission of the Translator’s LiteraryEstate and The Hogarth Press.From Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious EroticCustom. Reprinted by permission of its publisher Walton H. Rawls, NewYork, 1966. (Distributed by Twayne Publishers. )From Pauline Reage, Story of O. Copyright © 1965 by Grove Press. Reprinted bypermission of Grove Press, Inc.From Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. Copyright, 1929, by VirginiaWoolf; renewed, 1957, by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Reprinted bypermission of the publisher.