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orgasm. This prohibits a sexuality for women outside the boundaries of male dominance. This makes any woman-centered sexuality impossible. What it does make possible is a woman’s continued existence within a system in which men control the valuation of her existence as an individual. This valuation is based on her sexual conformity within a sexual system based on his right to

possess her. Women are brought up to conform: all the rules of

fem ininity— dress, behavior, attitude—essentially break the spirit.

Women are trained to need men, not sexually but m etaphysically.

Women are brought up to be the void that needs filling, the absence that needs presence. Women are brought up to fear men and to know that they must please men and to understand that they

cannot survive without the help of men richer and stronger than

they can be themselves, on their own. Women are brought up to

submit to intercourse— and here the strategy is shrewd— by being

kept ignorant of it. The rules are taught, but the act is hidden.

Girls are taught “love, ” not “fuck. ” Little girls look between their

legs to see if “the hole” is there, get scared thinking about what

“the hole” is for; no one tells them either. Women use their bodies

to attract men; and most women, like the little girls they were, are

astonished by the brutality of the fuck. The importance of this

ignorance about intercourse cannot be overstated: it is as if no girl

would grow up, or accept the hundred million lessons on how to

be a girl, or want boys to like her, if she knew what she was for.

The propaganda for fem ininity assumes that the girl still lives inside the woman; that the lessons of femininity must be taught and

retaught without letup; that the woman left to herself would repudiate the male use of her body, simply not accept it. The propaganda for femininity teaches women over and over, endlessly, that they must like intercourse; and the lesson must be taught over and

over, endlessly, because intercourse does not express their own

sexuality in general and the male use of women rarely has anything

to do with the woman as an individual. The sexuality they are

supposed to like does not recognize, let alone honor, their individuality in any meaningful way. The sexuality they must learn to like is not concerned with desire toward them as distinct personalities—at best they are “types”; nor is it concerned with their own desire toward others.

Despite the propaganda, the mountains of it, intercourse requires force; force is still essential to make women have intercourse—at least in a systematic, sustained way. Despite every single platitude about love, women and men, passion, femininity,

intercourse as health or pleasure or biological necessity, it is forced

sex that keeps intercourse central and it is forced sex that keeps

women in sexual relation to men. If the force were not essential,

the force would not be endemic. If the force were not essential, the

law would not sanction it. If the force were not essential, the force

itself would not be defined as intrinsically “sexy, ” as if in practicing force sex itself is perpetuated.

The first kind of force is physical violence: endemic in rape, battery, assault.

The second kind of force is the power differential between male

and female that intrinsically makes any sex act an act of force: for

instance, the sexual abuse of girls in families.

The third kind of force is economic: keeping women poor to

keep women sexually accessible and sexually compliant.

The fourth kind of force is cultural on a broad scale: woman-

hating propaganda that makes women legitimate and desirable sexual targets; woman-hating laws that either sanction or in their actual application permit sexual abuse of women; woman-hating

practices of verbal harassment backed by the threat of physical violence on the streets or in the workplace; woman-hating textbooks used to teach doctors, lawyers, and other professionals misogyny

as a central element of the practice of their profession; woman-

hating art that romanticizes sexual assault, stylizes and celebrates

sexual violence; woman-hating entertainment that makes women as

a class ridiculous, stupid, despicable, and the sexual property of

all men.