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surface condition, with prostitution being its wider, more important, hidden base, the largely unacknowledged sexual-economic necessity of women. (See drawings 3 and 4. ) Each has to be understood as intrinsically part of the condition of women—pornography being what women are, prostitution being what women do, the circle of crimes being what women are for. Rape, battery, economic exploitation, and reproductive exploitation require pornography as female metaphysics so as to be virtually self-justifying, virtually invisible abuses; and they also require the wall of prostitution confining women (meaning that whatever women do is within the bounds of prostitution) so that women are always and absolutely accessible. The heart of pornography and the wall of prostitution mirror each other in that both are meant to mean—and concretely do mean in the male system—that women deserve the

crimes that define their condition, that those crimes are responses

to what women are and what women do, that the crimes committed against women define the condition of women correctly— in accordance with what women are and what women do.

T he meaning of this description of what women’s subordination

is, how women are kept subordinate, how that subordination is

acted out on women system atically, is simple for feminists: breaking the circle up, breaking down the w all, annihilating the system ’s heart, are what we must do. The meaning for antifeminists is also

simple: whatever strengthens or vitalizes any aspect of the model is

of great practical value in keeping women subordinate. Antifeminists can disagree strategically (for instance, on whether pornography should be public or private) without disagreeing in principle on what is necessary to keep women encapsulated in subjection (the

use of pornography, its cultural and psychic centrality whether it is

public or private, the use of women as pornography in public and

in private). But one cannot be a feminist and support any element

in this model: there are no exceptions— not civil liberties lawyers

or liberals or sym pathetic men or so-called feminists who indulge

in using the label but evading the substance. Antifeminist politics

come in many guises, but a vivid memory of what the condition of

women is— w hat crimes articulate it, what is at its heart, what is

the impenetrable boundary beyond which women do not pass—

provides a standard for discerning antifeminism in any political

stance. No one can defend or give aid and comfort to that which

keeps women subordinate and at the same time claim to be acting

in behalf of women’s liberation: feminism is not a lifestyle or an

attitude or a feeling of vague sym pathy with women or an assertion

of modernity. Antifeminism saturates the political spectrum from

Right to Left, liberal to conservative, reactionary to progressive.

Antifeminism is resistance to the liberation of women from the sex-

class system , that resistance expressed in constructing political defenses of the constituent parts of sex oppression. This antifeminism is a vital part of programs, values, ideologies, philosophies, arguments, actions, economic, sexual, and social manipulations that are the substance of most political discourse and organizing. Antifeminism is a potent expression of reaction, backlash, and suppression;

DRAWING 3. PROSTITUTION AS

THE MATERIAL REALITY;

PORNOGRAPHY AS

THE UNDERLYING IDEOLOGY

THE C I R C L E OF C R I M E S A G A I N S T WO M E N

P R O S T I T U T I O N

DRAWING 4. PORNOGRAPHY AS

THE SURFACE PHENOMENON:

PROSTITUTION AS

THE UNDERLYING SYSTEM

it is protean; it is easy, popular, and always fashionable in one

form or another.

Antifeminism is also operating whenever any political group is

ready to sacrifice one group of women, one faction, some women,

some kinds of women, to any element of sex-class oppression: to

pornography, to rape, to battery, to economic exploitation, to reproductive exploitation, to prostitution. There are women all along the male-defined political spectrum, including on both extreme

ends of it, ready to sacrifice some women, usually not themselves,