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altogether by Phyllis Schlafly, who waxes euphoric on having children: “None of those measures of career success [traveling to “exciting faraway places, ” having authority over others, winning, or earning a fortune] can compare with the thrill, the satisfaction, and

the fun of having and caring for babies, and watching them respond and grow under a mother’s loving care. More babies m ultiply a woman’s jo y . ” 15 The thrill, the endlessly m ultiplying joy, was not in God’s original intention; and indeed, it is unlikely that

Schlafly has outwilled him. In the sorrow of having children there

is the recognition that one’s humanity is reduced to this, and on

this one’s survival depends. Being a woman is this, or it is unspeakably worse than this. Homosexuality brings up for women the barrenness of not even having this. A woman has committed

her life to bringing forth children in order to have a life of dignity

and worth; she has found the one w ay in which she is absolutely

necessary; and then, that is gone as an absolute. It must be an

absolute, because there are women who stake their lives on it as an

absolute; it is certainly what women have had to count on. Everything that women have to gain from homosexuality— and women have a great deal to gain from it: less forced penetration of themselves, for instance— is obliterated by the fear of losing what value women have, a fear conjured up by homosexuality in women

whose own right to life is in having children. Despite all the happy

talk of the total women, there is a fierce anxiety there: if men did

not need babies, and women to have them, these bright wives

would be shivering on street corners like the other fast fucks. Her

womb is her wealth; her use in childbearing is his strongest tie to

her; she holds his [sic] children, actual and potential, hostage, for

her own sake. It is not rational to hate homosexuals because they

force one to experience a terror of extinction: the cold chill of being

useless, unnecessary, expendable. But passions are distinguished

by their illogic: one can describe them and find an interior logic in

them up to a point—then there is a sensational leap into hate, dazzling, crazed, obsessional. Homophobia, like anti-Semitism, is not an idea; it is a passion. For women, hatred of homosexuals—

despised because they are associated with women—is more than

self-defeating; it is almost breathtakingly suicidal, encouraging as it

does the continuing hatred of anything or anyone associated with

women. But the perception that having children is the only edge

women have on survival at the hands of men is right; it is an acute

perception, grounded in an accurate reading of what women are for

and how women are used by men in this sexual system. Without

reproduction, women as a class have nothing. In sorrow or not,

bearing babies is what women can do that men need—really need,

no handjob can substitute here; and homosexuality makes women

afraid, irrationally, passionately afraid, of extinction: of being unnecessary as a class, as women, to men who destroy whatever they do not need and whose impulses toward women are murderous

anyway.

5

The Coming Gynocide

Rich as you are

Death will finish

you: afterwards no

one will remember

or want you;. . .

Sappho

In A Room o f One's O w n, first read as a paper in 1928, the prescient

Virginia Woolf called the attention of the women in her audience

to a statement by a popular British journalist of the time who

warned “that when children cease to be altogether desirable,

women cease to be altogether necessary. ” 1 The woman who is deviant because she has no children, as Woolf was even in her avant-garde set, is often aware of how tenuous her existence is: it is a

courtesy extended to her— letting her go on—despite the fact that

she is not earning her womanly keep in the womanly w ay. She

knows how little the world at large needs her or values her for

anything else she does even when she is exceptional; and if she

understands how systematic and relentless the valuation of her

kind is, she also knows that at the heart of the male system there is

a profound contempt for anything in women that is individual, that