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standard of what a woman is and what a woman does and what a

woman needs to be a woman (she needs to keep doing female

things, whether she wants to or not). What are the lives of all these

women worth? Is there anything in the w ay they are viewed or

valued that upholds their human dignity as individuals? T hey already matter very little. T hey are treated with cruelty or callous indifference. T hey have already been thrown aw ay. It is public

policy to throw them aw ay. What is going to happen to women

when reproduction— the only capacity that women have that men

really need (Portnoy’s piece of liver can substitute for the rest in

hard times)— is no longer the exclusive province of the class

women? W hat is going to happen to women who have only one

argument for the importance of their existence— that their reproductive capacities are worth a little something (shelter, food, solace, minimal respect)— when men can make babies?

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And yet, there is a solitude which each and every

one o f us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profoundthan the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner

being which we call ourself, no eye nor touch o f man

or angel has ever pierced. It is more hidden than the

caves of the gnome; the sacred adytum o f the oracle;

the hidden chamber o f Eleusinian m ystery, for to it

only omniscience is permitted to enter.

Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take,

dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speech,

January 18, 1892

There is no thing named love in the world.

Women are dinks. Women are villains. They are

creatures akin to Communists and yellow-skinned

people and hippies. We march off to learn about

hand-to-hand combat. Blynton grins and teases and

hollers out his nursery rhyme: “If ya wanta live, ya

gotta be ag-ile, mo-bile, and hos-tile. ” We chant the

words: ag-ile, mo-bile, hos-tile. We make it all

rhyme.

Tim O’Brien, I f I Die in a Combat Zone

There are two models that essentially describe how women are

socially controlled and sexually used: the brothel model and the

farming model.

The brothel model relates to prostitution, narrowly defined;

women collected together for the purposes of sex with men;

women whose function is explicitly nonreproductive, almost anti-

reproductive; sex animals in heat or pretending, showing themselves for sex, prancing around or posed for sex.

The farming model relates to motherhood, women as a class

planted with the male seed and harvested; women used for the fruit

they bear, like trees; women who run the gamut from prized cows

to mangy dogs, from highbred horses to sad beasts of burden.

These two poles of the female condition are only superficially

and conceptually distinct and opposite. Men say the two are poles

to begin with, distinct and opposite. That male conceit is registered and repeated until it is easier to repeat the concept by rote than to see the reality. But the concept is only accurate (descriptive) from a male point of view—that is, if one accepts the male definitions of both the acts involved and the women involved. In

the course of women’s lives, and therefore from a woman-based