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submission, is that the woman has real power: she is only the apparent victim; she is only seemingly powerless. Her power is in her capacity to provoke erection or lust. Men suffer arousal passively—

against their will or regardless of their will. They then act on what

a woman, or any sex object, has provoked. She provokes what she

wants. When a man has an erection and commits a sexual act because of it or in response to it, he is acting in response to a provocation by a woman, whose nature and intent are well met by his act.

In pornography, the male sexual values that inform and permeate

rape and other forced sex acts are articulated without apology. The

genre insists that sex is conquest, that the woman who resists

wants to be forced, hurt, brutalized; that the woman who wants

sex gets pleasure from being used like a thing, from pain and humiliation. The genre insists that rape, battery, physical torture, bondage, capture, and imprisonment are things done to women

because women provoke them the same way that women provoke

erection: by being there, by being female. Provoking these acts is

the power women have over men; women get men to do these

things, to perform these sex acts. In the world men seem to exercise power, but all of that comes to nothing in the face of the lust provoked by a woman. W hatever he does to her, she is still more

powerful than he is because he wants her, he needs her, he is being

driven by a desire for her. In the sexual woman-superior model,

power is articulated as being intrinsically female because power is

redefined beyond reason, beyond coherence: as if power is in the

corpse that draws the vultures. This pornographic conception of

female power is fundamental to the antifeminism of sexual-libera-

tion movements in which unlim ited sexual use of women by men is

defined as freedom for both: she wants it; he responds; vo ili! the

revolution. It is also fundamental to the antifeminism of the legal

system with respect to sexual crimes like rape, battery, and sexual

abuse of children, especially girls. The female is still seen as the

provocation for what might be a legitimate sex act, depending on

just how provocative she was. Her w ill is regarded as probably

implicit in the use the male made of her. The female is seen to have

power over the man— and responsibility for what he has done to

her— because he wanted her so bad: she has provoked whatever

desire motivated him to act. His desire is what gives her power.

Her power is in her sexual nature, her existence as a woman to

which he responds— not in her behavior. For this reason, rape inquiries search her behavior to find the truth about her nature. If her nature is finally seen to warrant his act, he is not responsible

for it— she is. T his is the power of women in pornographic sex.

The apologies for this sexual system that claim that women are

powerful because women are desired— in fact, that go so far as to

insist that women are sex-dominant and sex-controlling— uphold

this phantasmagoric female power, keeping women in real life

powerless. T he antifeminism is directly implicit in the pornographic conceptions of female power, female nature, and female

freedom. Her power is in being used, her nature is to be used, and

her freedom is in being used. Or, her power is in provoking men to

hurt her, her nature is to provoke men to hurt her, and her freedom is in provoking pain. Or, her power is in making men force her to do what she does not want to do, her nature is to make men

force her to do what she does not want to do, and her freedom is in

being forced to do what she does not want to do. These principles

of antifeminism effectively confound both power and freedom: the

response in most women is to want neither. A woman’s individual

nature is more than confounded: it is frequently annihilated.

The male-dominant model of antifeminism is virtually everywhere. Its woman-hating dimensions have been discussed brilliantly in many feminist texts; here the focus will be on how it functions to stop a liberation movement. Religion and biology are

the great roots of the metaphysical idea that men are superior to

women because they are. Whether male dominance is described as

a kind of perpetual biological pillaging or the will of a merely