Читаем Right-wing Women полностью

is the curse of her sex; illegal abortion is deserved suffering. But

illegal abortion also serves her because it puts abortion out of sight.

No one has to be confronted with another woman making a choice,

choosing not to be a mother. No one must face women openly with

priorities other than marriage and conformity. No one must face a

woman refusing to be bound by pregnancy. The women who rebel

against their function must do it secretly, not causing grief, embarrassment, or confusion to other women isolated in their own reproductive quagmires, each on her own, each alone, each being a woman for all women in silence and in suffering and in solitude.

With illegal abortion life or death is up to God: each time, one

submits to the divine hand, divine finger on divine revolver pointed

at the already bloody flesh of a woman, divine Russian roulette. It

is a final, humiliated submission to the will of a superior Male who

judges absolutely. Death is a judgment and so is life. Illegal abortion is an individual hell; one suffers, does penance: God decides; life is forgiveness. And no one need face it until it happens to

her— until she is the one caught. This is the w ay in which women

are moral idiots in this system: ignoring whatever has to do with

other women, all women, until or unless it happens to oneself.

Right-wing women also believe that a woman who refuses to bear a

child deserves to die. Right-wing women are prepared to accept

that judgment against themselves; and when they survive, they are

guilty and prepared to pay— to m artyr themselves for an act of will

to which they had no right as women. There is no better measure

of what forced sex does to women— how it destroys self-respect

and the w ill to survive as a self-determining human being— than

the opposition of right-wing women to legal abortion: to what they

need to save themselves from being butchered. The training of a

girl to accept her place in sex in marriage and the use of a woman

in sex in marriage means the annihilating of any will toward self-

determination or freedom; her personhood is so demeaned that it

becomes easier to risk death or maiming than to say no to a man

who will fuck you anyw ay, with the blessings of God and state, ’til

death do you part.

4

Jews and Homosexuals

A minister from Oklahoma, dressed in a shiny brown polyester

suit, hair greased down even shinier than the shiny suit, smile from

ear to ear even shinier than the shiny hair, was picketing, leaf-

leting, and preaching outside the Sam Houston Coliseum in

Houston. He was full of love for the Lord, love for his neighbors,

the love of Christ; it was sin he hated, especially when it was embodied in the filthy lesbians who had come to Houston to destroy the work of God. He kept preaching to the feminists converging on

the Coliseum that nothing was as loathsome as homosexuality; but

in women! to contemplate the abomination in women whom God

commanded to obey their husbands as Christ was so repugnant to

this minister that he predicted God might call down the walls of

the Coliseum then and there. I approached him alone to talk as

other women ignored him entirely. I asked him what he thought of

the high-spirited, vital women going in: did they all seem evil and

loathsome? could he tell which were lesbians and which were not?

what kind of harm did lesbians do to other people? if lesbians did

no one harm (for instance, did not murder, did not rape), w hy was

he, a minister, called on to denounce lesbians? was not this particular sin, so singularly lacking in malice, better left to God to judge?

why did lesbians provoke not only God’s judgment but also the

minister’s wrath? He referred to these passages from Romans: *

*The translation quoted is the King James Version. However, the phrases

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an

image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-

footed beasts, and creeping things.

Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through

the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies

between themselves;

Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped

and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed

for ever. Amen.