Читаем Right-wing Women полностью

by the w om an, out o f her own genuine affection and d e s ir e ” 19 This

shocks, bewilders—who can imagine it, what can it mean? Now as

then, there is one woman speaking, not a movement. *

Woodhull was not taken seriously as a thinker, writer, publisher,

journalist, activist, pioneer, by those who followed her—not by

the historians, teachers, intellectuals, revolutionaries, reformers;

not by the lovers or rapists; not by the women. Had she been part

of the cultural dialogue on sexual issues, the whole subsequent development of movements for sexual freedom would have been different in character: because she hated rape and prostitution and

*In a recent essay, novelist Alice Walker wrote:. . I submit that any

sexual intercourse between a free man and a human being he owns or

controls is rape. ” (See “Embracing the Dark and the Light, ” Essence, July

1982, p. 117. ) This definition has the advantage of articulating the power

that is the context for as well as the substance of the act.

understood them as violations of sexual freedom, which male liber-

ationists did not. But then, this was w hy she was excluded: the

men wanted the rape and prostitution. She threatened not only

those sacred institutions but the male hallucinations that prettify

those institutions: those happy visions of happy women, caged, domesticated or wanton, numb to rape, numb to being bought and sold. Her sexual intelligence was despised, then ignored, because

of what it revealed: he who hates the truth hates the intelligence

that brings it.

Sexual intelligence in women, that rarest intelligence in a male-

supremacist world, is necessarily a revolutionary intelligence, the

opposite of the pornographic (which sim ply reiterates the world as

it is for women), the opposite of the w ill to be used, the opposite of

masochism and self-hatred, the opposite of “good woman” and

“bad woman” both. It is not in being a whore that a woman becomes an outlaw in this man’s world; it is in the possession of herself, the ownership and effective control of her own body, her

separateness and distinctness, the integrity of her body as hers, not

his. Prostitution m ay be against the written law, but no prostitute

has defied the prerogatives or power of men as a class through

prostitution. No prostitute provides any model for freedom or action in a world of freedom that can be used with intelligence and integrity by a woman; the model exists to entice counterfeit female

sexual revolutionaries, gullible liberated girls, and to serve the men

who enjoy them. The prostitute is no honest woman. She manipulates as the wife manipulates. So too no honest woman can live in marriage: no woman honest in her will to be free. Marriage delivers

her body to another to use: and there is no basis for self-respect in

this carnal arrangement, however sanctified it may be by church

and state.

Wife or whore: she is defined by what men want; sexual intelligence is stopped dead. Wife or whore: to paraphrase Thackeray, her heart is dead (“Her heart was dead long before her body. She

had sold it to become Sir Pitt C raw ley’s wife. Mothers and daugh­

ters are making the same bargain every day in Vanity Fair” 20).

Wife or whore: both are fucked, bear children, resent, suffer, grow

numb, want more. Wife or whore: both are denied a human life,

forced to live a female one. Wife or whore: intelligence denied,

annihilated, ridiculed, obliterated, primes her to surrender—to her

female fate. Wife or whore: the two kinds of women whom men

recognize, whom men let live. Wife or whore: battered, raped,

prostituted; men desire her. Wife or whore: the whore comes in

from the cold to become the wife if she can; the wife thrown out

into the cold becomes the whore if she must. Is there a way out of

the home that does not lead, inevitably and horribly, to the street

corner? This is the question right-wing women face. This is the

question all women face, but right-wing women know it. And in