Читаем Right-wing Women полностью

sexual activity” (The Rights of Women, Susan C. Ross [New York: Avon,1973], p. 176); equal right to sexual activity is seen to be the civil liberties

issue of paramount importance and laws against prostitution are simply a

cover for denying women the right to sexual activity. This is not a narrow

discussion o f laws on prostitution and their sex-discriminatory language or

enforcement. It is a position on what rights are for women, what freedom

is. There is no mention o f marital rape or o f the marital rape exemption as

violations of civil liberties and no discussion whatsoever of sexual coercion

in marriage sanctioned by law in letter and in practice as a violation o f civil

liberties. The discussion o f rape also makes no reference to marital rape or

the role o f law in upholding it.

tion of his wife. Marriage is the common state of adult women;

women live in a system in which sex is forced on them; and the sex

is intercourse. Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex.

Women, it is not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment

against forced sex and a longing for freedom, which is often expressed as an aversion to sex. It is a fact for women that they must come to terms with forced sex over and over in the course of a

normal life.

Forced sex, usually intercourse, is a central issue in any woman’s

life. She must like it or control it or manipulate it or resist it or

avoid it; she must develop a relationship to it, to the male insistence on intercourse, to the male insistence on her sexual function in relation to him. She will be measured and judged by the nature

and quality of her relationship to intercourse. Her character will be

assessed in terms of her relationship to intercourse, as men evaluate

that relationship. All the possibilities of her body will be reduced

to expressing her relationship to intercourse. Every sign on her

body, every symbol—clothes, posture, hair, ornament—will have

to signal her acceptance of his sex act and the nature of her relationship to it. His sex art, intercourse, explicitly announces his power over her: his possession of her interior; his right to violate

her boundaries. His state promotes and protects his sex act. If she

were not a woman, this intrusion by the state would be recognized

as state coercion, or force. The act itself and the state that protects

it call on force to exercise illegitimate power; and intercourse cannot be analyzed outside this system of force. But the force is hidden and denied by a barrage of propaganda, from pornography to so-called women’s magazines, that seek to persuade that accommodation is pleasure, or that accommodation is femininity, or that accommodation is freedom, or that accommodation is a strategic

means to some degree of self-determination.

The propaganda for femininity (femininity being the apparent

acceptance of sex on male terms with goodwill and demonstrable

good faith, in the form of ritualized obsequiousness) is produced

according to the felt need of men to have intercourse. In a time of

feminist resistance, such propaganda increases in bulk geometrically. The propaganda stresses that intercourse can give a woman pleasure if she does it right: especially if she has the right attitude

toward it and toward the man. The right attitude is to want it. The

right attitude is to desire men because they engage in phallic penetration. The right attitude is to want intercourse because men want it. The right attitude is not to be selfish: especially about