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mean women first, women best, women only. It does mean that

the fate of every individual woman—no matter what her politics,

character, values, qualities—is tied to the fate of all women

whether she likes it or not. On one level, it means that every

woman’s fate is tied to the fate of women she dislikes personally.

On another level, it means that every woman’s fate is tied to the

fate of women whom she politically and morally abhors. For in-

stance, it means that rape jeopardizes communist and fascist

women, liberal, conservative, Democratic, or Republican women,

racist women and black women, Nazi women and Jew ish women,

homophobic women and homosexual women. The crimes committed against women because they are women articulate the condition of women. T he eradication of these crimes, the transformation of the condition of women, is the purpose of feminism: which means that feminism requires a most rigorous definition of

what those crimes are so as to determine what that condition is.

This definition cannot be compromised by a selective representation of the sex class based on sentim entality or wishful thinking.

This definition cannot exclude prudes or sluts or dykes or mothers

or virgins because one does not want to be associated w ith them.

To be a feminist means recognizing that one is associated with all

women not as an act of choice but as a matter of fact. The sex-class

system creates the fact. When that system is broken, there w ill

be no such fact. Feminists do not create this common condition

by making alliances: feminists recognize this common condition

because it exists as an intrinsic part of sex oppression. The fundamental knowledge that women are a class having a common condition— that the fate of one woman is tied substantively to the fate of all women— toughens feminist theory and practice. That fundamental knowledge is an almost unbearable test of seriousness.

There is no real feminism that does not have at its heart the tempering discipline of sex-class consciousness: knowing that women share a common condition as a class, like it or not.

W hat is that common condition? Subordinate to men, sexually

colonized in a sexual system of dominance and submission, denied

rights on the basis of sex, historically chattel, generally considered

biologically inferior, confined to sex and reproduction: this is the

general description of the social environment in which all women

live. But what is the real map of that environment? Which crimes

create the topography? Drawing 1 shows the basic condition of

E CONOMI C

R A P E

EXPLOI TATI ON

P R O S TI TU T I O N

DRAWING 1. THE CONDITION OF WOMEN

women, a lateral view of the female bottom of sex hierarchy. Rape,

battery, economic exploitation, and reproductive exploitation are

the basic crimes committed against women in the sex-class system

in which they are devalued because they are women. The crimes

are points on a circle because it is a closed system , from nowhere to

nowhere. These specific crimes are each committed against huge

percentages of the female population at any given time. Rape, for

instance, consists not only of police-blotter rape but also marital

rape, incestuous abuse of girls, any sex that is coerced. Battery is

estimated to have happened to 50 percent of married women in the

United States alone. All housewives are economically exploited; all

working women are. Reproductive exploitation includes forced

pregnancy and forced sterilization. There are few female lives not

touched by one, two, or three of these crimes and significantly

determined by all of them. At the heart of the female condition is

pornography: it is the ideology that is the source of all the rest; it

truly defines what women are in this system — and how women are

treated issues from what women are. Pornography is not a metaphor for what women are; it is what women are in theory and in practice. Prostitution is the outer w all, sym bolically the mirror reflection of the pornography, metaphorically built out of brick, concrete, stone, to keep women in—in the sex class. Prostitution is the all-encompassing condition, the body trapped in barter, the body

imprisoned as commodity. W ith respect to the circle of crim es—

rape, battery, reproductive exploitation, economic exploitation—

the crimes can be placed anywhere in the circle in any order. T hey