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Title: The Poverty of Feminism
Author: Dominique Karamazov
Date: 1977
Language: en
Topics: feminism, gender roles
Source: Retrieved on February 18, 2011 from http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Poverty%20of%20Feminism
Notes: Originally published as “Misere du feminisme” in ‘La Guerre Sociale’, 1977.

Dominique Karamazov

The Poverty of Feminism

Author’s note

We see in The Poverty of Feminism how feminism, in spite of its

emancipatory and radical airs, remains in the area of capitalist society

and even becomes guardian of traditional female alienation.

Against trials for rape we oppose a critique of emotional, social and

sexual poverty, both male and female.

Feminism is a manifestation of daily banality. It is not enough to

define it an incomplete revolt, soliciting it to become total by

abandoning the purely women’s point of view — following the same logic

that opposes generalised self-management to the errors of

self-management. What needs to be shown up is its content and the

inversions that it involves in terms of real solutions.

Who are we addressing ourselves to? First of all to feminists! Obviously

not the professional ones, but to all those who find and identify

themselves in this movement, demonstrating that only the transformation

of social relations makes it possible to resolve the problems and needs

that are lost in this cul de sac.

“Ras le viol!” “Terre des Hommes, viol de nuit”, “La drague, c‘est le

viol”.

“Pornography = theory, rape = practice ...”

Feminist slogans echo the headlines in the sensationalist press. A new

battle horse has taken the place of abortion. Graffiti, demonstrations,

judicial battles, debates, trials and wild reprisals have developed

around it.

Feminists are leading the parade, but they are not alone. The leftists

are close behind. How could they fail to react to such an odious form of

oppression — after all are they not specialists in totally unfocussed

denunciation? And long live women’s struggle alongside that of the

workers, unemployed youth, oppressed nations, hunters and wild ducks! Of

course it isn’t always easy for them to make pronouncements on

everything without becoming aware of their contradictions, but then,

don’t they present themselves as not merely the gatherers of dissent,

but also as the necessary unifiers of discontent?

The media don’t sit on the side lines. They wisely condemn “excesses”

but take the opportunity to liven up the monotony of their news by

echoing the feminist “struggle”.

On television, the radio, in the trades union press, there are

discussions to find out whether rape is the act of “uncouth”

individuals, or of the mentally sick. Does it or does it not produce

incurable trauma? Rape victims from young girls to grandmothers testify.

Even ex-rapists...

The traditional women’s papers are clearly not far behind. They change

as women change. After all it’s in their own interest if they don’t want

to lose a considerable part of their readership. Already in Germany the

magazine “Emma”, which is clearly feminist, not just feminine, has

established itself in the market. In France, “Marie-Claire” contents

itself with a feminist supplement.

Readers who are no longer satisfied with the lonely hearts column or the

art of knitting can be titillated by such articles as “How to say no to

a rapist and survive”: “So here you are in the bushes, still standing

but reeling with the man’s hands grabbing you. The effect of the shock

wears off a little. You realise this is a rape attempt and that you are

the victim. What you need is to gain time to think without him hitting

you. How?” (“Cosmopolitan”) Be prepared: take up martial arts, yoga,

practice psychological ruses; it’s good for the figure, for your health

and then, you never know...

Rape does exist and, just as with crime in general, it’s on the

increase. Various factors contribute to making rape common, even normal

in the eyes of some people: revenge or an easy compensation involving no

great risk. In fact most rapists don’t get caught. Often the victims

don’t even report it. Due to shame, fear, a sense of futility or not

wanting to bring punishment to a member of the family? From a gang of

lads who “take advantage” of a “girlfriend” with fifteen of them

gang-banging her, to those weekend “funseekers” who kidnap and amuse

themselves with a mentally retarded girl, not forgetting the horror of

rape followed by the murder of children, women or couples, it is

possible to accumulate a hoard of sordid, tragic and sometimes

tragi-comic tales.

Yet it is difficult not to feel uneasy about the fight that is being put

up against rape, about the tone and methods being used. Moreover this

unease is probably felt by those involved as well: some feminists make

it clear that they are not against all men, that rapists are above all

victims of society, that they are not calling for repression and only

use the courts for publicity, in order to break the silence.

Not all feminists express such understanding. Some call for heavier

sentences. In Rome demonstrators against the gang-rape of Maria reacted

with anti-male hysteria. In Wisconsin, USA, the feminists together with

some institutions hardly to be suspected of extremism got on the tracks

of a judge. His crime? He had refused to imprison a fifteen year old boy

who had raped a sixteen year old girl at school, putting him on a year’s

probation and justifying his act as something normal given the victim’s

sexy clothing and the generally eroticised climate in which it took

place.

So rape is everywhere. The chat-up is rape, domination is rape. Man is

by nature rapist and woman his eternal, innocent victim.

Some extreme feminists claim that penetration is an act of domination, a

form of humiliation to be refused. Some of them even say that violence

and exploitation are the acts of males alone and that this part of

humanity must therefore be neutralised or eliminated by the arrival of a

world of women where, thanks to the progress in biology, reproduction

will be carried out without men.

No matter what delirium might strike feminism and the progress in

biology, it is true that to claim to discourage rapists without having

recourse to police and judicial repression only complicates the matter.

When the conditions that give rise to rape — the fact that it expresses

(even in a barbarous way) a fundamental need and that it is a response

to a certain general female attitude — are not understood, or there is

no desire to understand it, the only consistent answer is repression:

repress the problem.

Are rapists male conquerors chasing women through the streets, modern

tarzans swinging from balcony to balcony prick in hand and a flower

between their teeth? The most reliable statistics state that they are

not. Immigrant worker or local family man, the typical rapist does not

belong to that species. It is difficult to build them up into an

expression of triumphant phallocracy, the image which so exasperates the

feminists.

Rape is basically the sad revenge of a victim, a poor man’s undertaking.

It is not a result of bourgeois wealth or phallocratic arrogance, but

their sub-product. If only rape could be proved to be above all the act

of the privileged thirsting for proletarian flesh. How much easier it

would be to latch the just struggle of women to the old class

struggle... But there isn’t always a notary such as Leroy to devour, and

even maoist demagogy has its limits!

We run up against the upholders of order, but we also keep running up

against each other on a much more everyday level. This is the reality of

capitalism. The problem is not to give in, but neither should we create

racisms of all the real oppositions that come into being, dramatise

them, create a climate of psychosis where everyone is so edgy they

become victims of them twice over. All these background tensions are

soon dispersed in real social war.

Militant attitudes mask the incapacity to transform our daily life and

only aggravate the misery of those who adopt them. Feminist convictions

can co-exist with the most common-place misery. On the one hand the

dullest submission is accepted, to be avenged at the level of

imagination and ideology or screwed up in aggressive attitudes which

only contribute to the misfortune they feed off yet claim to fight. The

more daily life needs to be dressed up with ideological explanations and

rationalisations, the less it has any meaning in itself.

The failure of feminism isn’t that it incites women to anger and revolt

and sets off on a war against male behaviour. Capitalism or the crisis

of human relations in general aren’t chosen as the target due to a fear

of foundering in ideology, but because of the concrete people and

obstacles we run up against and which capital forces us to collide with.

Let women get angry with the men who oppress them, exploit them and

prevent them from living, as they reduce them to sex objects or

chambermaids... And let men do the same and put an end to these

hypocritical feelings of indulgence or the complacent irony that hides

neurotic dependence, in order to reach the requirements of human beings

as far as other human beings are concerned. What is scorned and used

cannot be loved.

A new version of the myth of Adam and Eve, of temptation and original

sin, the stupidity lies in wanting it to be “men’s fault” at all costs.

Perversion, and at the same time fantastic power is attributed to them,

hiding the nature of the system whose development is no more in men’s

hands than in those of women, even if it plays on their biological

differences.

Furthermore, feminism is incapable of understanding the link between

people’s biologically differentiated capabilities and needs, and their

function in society. It can only deny biological differences or make

them the absolute analytical principle, or even confuse both together:

“Everything is wrong because of men, who are neither better or worse

than women, and moreover the two sexes have similar capabilities but men

abuse theirs”.

The nature of rape and feminism

Rape has sometimes found those willing to defend it. According to the

“feminist” Fourier when he spoke of an individual who was sentenced for

having attacked a number of old ladies, rape is nature’s way of

realising unions which would otherwise be impossible.

But in all its barbarity the form the need can take is no less to be

rejected than the society which refuses the possibility of its

satisfaction. Rape is an expression of sexuality, but the sexual need is

yet to be satisfied by it. Is that the case for the victim? Is it even

for the aggressor? Neurosis and perversion exist as the incapacity to

realise desire.

Rape is a contradiction in act. It is the expression of the need for a

social and loving act absent in masturbation, swindled in prostitution

and even in regular domestic sexuality.

An incapacity for characterlogical reasons and the lack of a social

context in which to meet people and assure the coincidence of desires.

Frustration engenders aggression. The need for love veers into a

relationship of domination and destruction. In fact most solitary

rapists, paradoxically trying to arouse approbation or recognition by

force, feel rejected and despised.

Rape is linked to a whole non-sexual, anti-sexual way of considering and

practising sexuality, where women have a role to play just as men have,

even if their role consists, among other things, of not being

responsible. It is impossible to understand anything about sexual misery

if the way the behaviour of each sex balances and responds to the

behaviour of the other isn’t admitted. The alienation of men finds

support in that of women and vice versa. Homosexuality might confuse the

issue, but it doesn’t break the rule. To want to make woman the passive

victim of male behaviour or of her situation under the guise of

exonerating her from blame is to treat her with the utmost disdain.

In the United States the average duration of coitus is two minutes. The

accuracy of these measurements and records may be doubtful. But they fit

in with other information and show what the degree of sexual poverty

must be in the United States and not only there. Particularly with men,

such behaviour reduces fucking in the first place to a release of

tension, “having it off”, or simply scoring. A way of operating which is

in fact nothing more than a reluctance to display a loving sensual

attitude. The same behaviour which in rape goes with the conviction that

there is no need to worry about the way that goal is reached.

How could people suddenly abandon themselves to their sensuality, love,

caresses, rhythm, to their lover, when their education and all their

circumstances push them towards controlling themselves rather than

letting themselves go, to seeing everything in terms of competition,

power relationships and bluff? How could they when they come home in the

evening knackered from work, when at the weekend they are hampered with

the children, when they drag through the years with partners they no

longer love? There are many unhappy people whose profound misery and

overwork extinguish love.

Alongside all this shit rape remains quite a marginal phenomenon, even

if it is produced by it and the reactions it arouses are echoes of it.

Nevertheless it is quite hard to imagine feminist militants

demonstrating and demanding that men love them better, and therefore

fuck them better. That would be to say that those who treat them as

ill-fucked women are right, and to recognise a fatal dependence on men.

Moreover, it is true that it is not a question here of making demands,

but nevertheless it merits taking action — and even of making a

revolution.

Rape existed before capitalism, and rapists are not necessarily mentally

sick. So is the cause really as social as all that? Some people want to

make out that in the beginning there was rape and that, thanks to

civilisation and repression, this primary behaviour has now been

outgrown. Rape: biological or social phenomenon?

Rape is not bestial but human behaviour, even typically human, linked to

the fact that human sexuality is no longer guided by rigid mechanisms

and concentrated in precise periods like that of animals. Is rape normal

or abnormal behaviour? Still a weak question: it is obvious that any man

placed under certain conditions of excitation, frustration or force,

could be capable of rape. Rape is neither the foundation of, nor

external to, male sexuality. Rape cannot be dealt with by moral

judgements but by the creation of conditions which permit the harmony of

desires and do not push individuals up blind alleys. Under certain

conditions anyone can commit murder. What shocks, perhaps, is that rape

is almost a male privilege. This lack of reciprocation is a flagrant

injustice. Perhaps we should stop asking for laws on equality and ask

instead for the abolition of sexual differences, which nevertheless

continue to give some people a few innocent pleasures.

Feminism is the expression of a basic movement bred by capitalism. A

formidable movement which tears woman from her traditional position and

revolutionises relationships between the sexes. It also contributes to a

more recent phenomenon which is countering and recuperating any

tendencies towards qualitative change: the reformism of daily life.

It would be a mistake to see feminism, just because it raises “human

problems”, as a radical revolt within the multiform movement which is

undermining the old world. But it would be equally mistaken to reduce it

to the distorted forms the malaise of the middle classes takes, just

because it is particularly among this social strata that it has become

an autonomous movement of women for women. The milieu that supports

feminism, just as the lawyers and writers and journalists who peddle it,

makes its mark upon it but does not explain its nature. As for those

people, such as the “total woman” movement in the United States, who

want feminism to take the opposite course and maintain or restore the

happy subdued housewife, they are swimming in vain against the current.

It is not feminism but capitalism that is throwing women into

wage-earning and reducing the time and effort dedicated to maternal and

domestic functions. Capitalist progress has led to the disappearance of

the principal role occupied by human energy. Energy has become that of

machines; violence that of firearms.

Apart from a few exceptions, maternity remains the prerogative of women.

But the modern woman lives longer than her forebears, has fewer children

and dedicates herself less to them. Given the decrease in infant

mortality, and hence a more efficient reproduction of the species,

increased life expectancy, contraception, feeding bottles, creches,

schools..., the maternal function defines and occupies women far less

than it did in the past.

The essential issue is that the traditional division of labour between

the sexes is losing its reason for existing; and that capitalism and not

women’s struggle against male oppression is undermining the old

hierarchical relationship between men and women. The important thing is

that it is the communist revolution and not feminism which could

complete this movement and reveal its content.

Feminism often proclaims its hostility to present society. It is

striking how little opposition it meets at the level of ideology and

principles: just a few sneers and grunts. That is what leads to its

raising its voice.

Feminism, in its widely acknowledged form as the ideology of women’s

emancipation, just as in its more radical one, is an expression of the

action of capital which is tending to liquidate old structures and

integrate women directly into its processes. Its fundamental nature

prevents it from transcending this, and any time it gets involved in

socialism and revolution it is usually to spread confusion. It latches

on to the cracked myth of the socialism of Eastern European countries,

pointing out that women are no better off there than under capitalism.

It argues that women should participate as such, or at least

autonomously, in all political revolutions in order to impose their own

interests. And it obviously intends to represent them in a political and

democratic way; it is speaking in the name of half the human race! It

denounces the concept of “conjugal duty” as covering up “legal rape”,

but almost forgets to denounce the institution of marriage which is just

as deadly for the man as for the woman. It conjures up a hypothetical

and antediluvian matriarchy to evoke future victory. It believes itself

to be radical because it has discovered that sexual inequality and

oppression came, before capitalism and are therefore more fundamental.

It refuses to see to what extent capitalism has revolutionised and

modernised the nature of this old oppression. Feminism is a product of

the modern world which it is incapable of understanding.

Feminism leans on the misery of the female condition, but it is above

all an expression of the rapid changes in this condition and the

problems thus raised. It is not a reaction against the old inferior

position of woman so much as against the contradictory functions and

status which are tearing women apart within the global transformation of

society. Above all women feel themselves to be in an inferior position

because, in spite of the fact that the old forms of inferior status are

crumbling and their situation is becoming comparable to that of men,

they are still relatively handicapped and unarmed compared to them at

work, in the street and in the family. Feminism is the falsified and

militant representation of this liquidation of the old female status. It

sets up a movement which fundamentally escapes the will of women (as

well as that of men) as the struggle of women and their allies against

male oppression and inequality. It only exists to the extent that

certain militant and political actions — De Gaulle and the women’s vote

for example — effectively liquidate old political and judicial shackles.

This militant vision is projected everywhere, and it mistakes the

secondary backlash that it gives rise to as the root of the problem in

much the same way as leftists see repression as the root of capitalism.

The problem becomes that of the dominance of men over women, which is to

be abolished or reversed by reaching equality of the sexes and the

sharing of power, or by the predominance of women. The problem of the

relationship between the sexes is conceived of as being in the first

place a power relationship to be frozen and codified in terms of

“rights” and “duties”. Everything is channelled into the false language

of the political and legal.

Capital does not develop smoothly and automatically. There are

resistances and setbacks. New contradictions develop. Feminism takes

root but it remains a prisoner of the capitalist universe.

Being a problem of the power of men over women, it imposes the amount of

fuss made over the question of rape. It embodies in a brutal,

unquestionable way the domination of men over women at the level of and

by virtue of the sexual differences. The phallus becomes an instrument

of an aggression which has no equivalent. That’s what rape amounts to:

not sadism or an expression of sexual misery.

From there onwards rape can be seen everywhere. It is not considered as

a concentrated and exacerbated expression of misery and dislocation but

as a model of interpretation to which everything can be reduced.

Here we find the role of the old anti-fascism at the level of everyday

life and its modern politicisation. The enemy is overt, brutal

constraint. The problem is a problem of power and its solution is

democratisation. The question of finding out how capitalism exploits and

alienates people at the same time as it fulfils their needs and elicits

their participation is avoided, as is the bourgeois nature of democracy.

Anti-fascism is not capable of understanding fascism as a product of

capital even if it tries to explain how it came about, but tends to see

fascism everywhere. People only act in that way if they are constrained

and forced to by those in power, never because of impersonal mechanisms

and needs.

The effects of power which show themselves at the everyday level are

just as much the doing of women as they are of men. The impossibility

and incapacity to act and to love is transformed into action against the

other in a perpetual search for power. But this is the result of a

dead-end rather than its primary cause.

Even if the number of indictments for rape were multiplied by ten (1.589

indictments in France in 1975), it can be seen that the risk of a woman

being raped is quite slight. Wouldn’t it be better to worry about

grandmothers whose savings get stolen or their handbags snatched? There

are countless vulnerable victims of ruthless hooligans!

The problem isn’t that rape is singled out, although it is not a waste

of time to point out its marginal character compared to the burglaries,

car accidents, and industrial diseases which affect the female

population just as badly. The problem is the way, for the want of a high

statistical frequency, its emotional content is used to dubious ends.

We shall see how feminism is nothing but a sub-product of this

“phallocratic society” which it denounces. First through the question of

repression and the use of the law. Then, as far as the relationship

between rape and desire is concerned, where it becomes the guardian of

traditional female alienation.

Repression and the legal carnival

Feminists imply that due to phallocracy rape was never seriously

punished before they began to intervene. In reality, throughout the ages

rape has been considered a singular crime that had to be severely

repressed. And it is possible even here to see the effects of

phallocracy. For the Romans it was a defence of the matron and the

sacred character of marriage (linked to that of property). In ancient

times drowning or stoning was the punishment. Women were strongly

encouraged to defend themselves or to call for help, so as to allay any

suspicions of complicity which would have led to their being punished

along with their aggressors. William the Conqueror instituted castration

and blinding to whoever raped a virgin. Rape is punished by imprisonment

or death according to Article 120 of the American military statute book.

In China and some other vanguard countries sexual delinquents are shot.

Of course a certain slackness can be noted, especially in times of war.

But the same goes for pillage. It’s war, and social rules don’t apply to

the enemy. Nevertheless it could be said that rape has always been

considered a crime. A particular crime not linked to damage or material

deprivation, but an attack on morality and sexual property. The

existence of rape cannot be dissociated from the system of morality and

sexual property which provokes it and condemns it at the same time.

The accusation of rape tends to be just as severe and disproportionate

to the real damage caused as there are rapists who remain unpunished.

Sentences must be all the heavier, in some cases ridiculously so, as the

guilty are seldom arrested. Is it a question of entering this logic,

screaming that rape is a crime which must be recognised and penalised

all the more as it is difficult to isolate and punish? Of having to make

examples? The fact that individuals, especially young people and

adolescents, are condemned to prison with sentences often ranging from 5

to 10 years, is just as vile as rape itself. Rape ends up being punished

more severely than passionate murder. It is just as vile that proposals

have been made to offer a choice of prison or castration to the sexually

disturbed. And once “treated”, they are exhibited and boast of their

newfound tranquility. How good it is to live without being pursued and

plagued by all those unhealthy impulses!

Feminist have put themselves on a legal terrain, first with the question

of abortion then with rape. In the first instance to defend the accused,

in the second it is they themselves who do the accusing.

It is obviously very dubious to make appeals to bourgeois justice in

order to defend one’s interests, and be reduced to conducting one’s

struggle in such a way. But often those who point this out and consider

it quite normal to “subvert” the law by using it against the bosses and

so exploit “the contradictions of the system”, are themselves highly

suspect. The fact that those accused of rape are victims, exploited in

turn and sometimes immigrants, isn’t a sufficient basis to call for

discrimination in their favour. Even though they are far more

vulnerable.

Not wanting to get involved in repression, rape victims and their

lawyers are often content to demand a symbolic sentence. Such was the

case of Brigitte (March 1977). She was attacked by an Egyptian student,

Youssi Eschack, who was eventually revealed to be impotent. The

solicitors of the plaintiff and the accused met to ask for Youssi

Eschack’s release from prison where he had been held for a year pending

trial. The court refused, pointing to the “seriousness of the

disturbance to public order” and to the fact that, being foreign, he

could abscond.

For Brigitte’s solicitors it was necessary however that the defendant be

judged in the High Court so as to have the criminal character of rape

recognised. Was there rape, or at least attempted rape? It is there, on

the nature of the aggressor’s intentions, that the debate was centred,

around which everything hung. Did this “beggar of love”, as his defence

called him, content himself with assault and battery, of strangulation

in the heat of the moment, or were they the means to satisfy more

sinister designs? What in fact was the nature of his impotence?

The problem is that feminism places itself just as much on the terrain

of legality as that of morality. And even when it wants to play judges

without soiling its hands with repression, as in the case of Brigitte,

it reveals itself to be just as inconsistent as the impotent rapist.

Above all what matters is that rape be recognised by society as a crime

— hence the need for rape to be judged in the High Court. There must be

a victim, a culprit and a sentence. Also it should be underlined that

the severity of the sentence does not necessarily depend on the

jurisdiction of the court. We, on the contrary, prefer to support

repression. In the sense of a good kicking.

One solution for a woman in the face of an attack which she feels to be

unbearable and, rightly or wrongly, also actually dangerous, is — as has

already happened — to injure or even kill her aggressor. Such a

reaction, whether effective or not, whether rational or not, and whether

proportional to the danger or not, is qualitatively different to any

activity which is intended to dramatise, condemn or punish. Whether by

recognition of and appeal to official justice or by the institution of

more or less picturesque people’s tribunals.

It has been proposed that rapists’ name and the terms of sentence be

displayed in town halls. He would lose the esteem of his fellow citizens

and — why not — also his job. Perhaps two birds could be killed with one

stone thus remedying female unemployment: would an unemployed

hitch-hiker have any chance of becoming a lorry driver?

Nobody doubts the material reality of murder, so why should that of rape

be doubted? It should be considered an offence and a crime and it is

time we started to take it seriously!

What is the reason for all this? First of all, the lack of physical

traces left by rape make the subjective witnessing of the victim all

important. And then, there is a certain male complicity, in any case

rape is considered a crime, not just a misdemeanour or a simple slap in

the face, but it is difficult to define its limits. Doubt and bad faith

find fertile soil on both sides. Honest citizens, even peaceful

teachers, have been seen to be wrongly accused of acts which they never

committed and which never even took place.

The sentence for rape rests solely on the testimony of the victim. And

if that is to be supported, one must effectively be convinced that

sadism, perversity and vengeance are exclusively male properties, and

that a woman cannot be affected by them. It’s as though the accusation

of rape has never been used for settling personal, racial or political

accounts, notably against revolutionaries. It goes as far as weighing up

and deciding the eventual sentence on the basis of the morality of the

accuser and the suspect. These sentences vary greatly. Those who defend

the elementary rights of the accused are immediately ready, no doubt as

atonement for centuries of women’s oppression, to base everything on the

testimony of the plaintiff alone.

It is a fact that the genital mucous membrane heals quickly, in less

than six hours. Should one complain? Murder itself isn’t as easy to

circumscribe as that. How many people die because they have gently been

pushed to suicide, or had their health undermined? In the factory? In

the home? More people are killed this way than by what are actually

recognised as crimes.

What has to be exploded is the concept of crime instead of clinging to

it and closing ourselves up in it and calling for “the introduction of a

penis into a vagina by force” to be condemned as something completely

distinct from common “assault and battery”.

Murder kills on every occasion, but not all rapes have the same effect,

because they contain different levels of sadism, and because the victims

vary. There is murderous rape and the “game” pushed too far. And,

contrary to what a decree of the Supreme Court of Appeal (June 14, 1971)

states, it makes no small difference “that the woman be a virgin or not,

married or single, honourable or prostitute”. The same violence could

push one to madness but leave the other with no more than a piquant

memory.

Is this differentiation suspect? Yes, if reality is flattened into its

legal or police dimension. It is deceitful to drown all rapes in the

same indivisible horror. The shock experienced by the victims is not

external to the atmosphere of fear and sexual poverty in which we live.

If an immediate solution existed whereby all sexual acts, just as all

relationships between individuals, could be based on mutual consent and

reciprocal pleasure, we can wager that it would already have been found.

But that cannot be. Reality, as far as it is concerned, does not let

itself thus be raped by whoever wants to impose their desires upon it.

And perhaps the result of it would be no more than a pallid evangelism.

To repress rape would not even be a sure way of inhibiting it, but even

if it were we would still have to know the price of this inhibition. The

rapist is more dangerous the more frightened he is. Would it regulate

the basic problem of repression and sexual frustration? A heavily

policed country like Japan has very few instances of rape; yet this

country is inundated with sado-masochistic and pornographic literature

and comic strips. In no way is it a paradise of female emancipation!

Prison sentences and judicial carnivals where lawyers fill their pockets

and build reputations while supporting great causes... But if we were to

accept all that or call for things to be run better, we would simply be

accepting this society based on solitude, non-communication, obsession

and fear of sex, latent sadism and vindictive imbecility.

Woman and desire

The struggle for free abortion, like that against rape, is a struggle

whose objectives cannot be rejected. But these objectives mask deeper

issues and a more profound aspect of women’s identity, their social role

and the real desires involved. The problem of abortion is also the

problem of the woman’s acceptance of her role as a mother. It is a

problem of sadism towards herself and the foetus, of guilt and a desire

for punishment linked to sexuality. It is also a matter of cramped

living conditions and low wages... To reduce all this to its “practical”

dimension, ignoring the deeper needs and the real constraints involved,

is to put oneself on the same terrain as capital. And a little

post-operative psychological or political counselling is not enough to

remedy it.

The debate to determine whether abortion is murder or not, and hence to

justify or condemn it in these terms, is sadly weak on both sides. It

side-steps the question and returns to the theological domain of asking

when the soul enters the body.

Some societies have practised infanticide to limit their population. A

human community can come to an agreement on the right to kill. The lives

of incurable patients, malformed children or foeti are not above human

judgement. And the problem is not that of asking for their consensus!

What is being sold with the liberalisation of abortion is the triumph of

asepsis. The butchery which is unbearable when a baby is involved seems

normal there, it is carried out in the dark and an act of killing is

transformed into an “operation”. The same society which is afraid of

death, blood and screams, maintains a whole industry around the

suffering and death of animals and remains nonchalant about mass

starvation in the third world. The same society that once wanted to

transform life is now content to “transform death”; it would like things

to get better but is scared of the revolution because it might be

violent.

“Free abortion on demand”, why not? But of course the time when free

bread was what was dreamed of has gone. But why, amongst a whole host of

things, should it be abortion and not housing, milk or meat? It is true

that some leftists are also calling for free weekly transport passes.

Not the underground, free transport, but free passes to get to work!

Sexuality is par excellence the domain of abandon. It is a matter of

being “ravished”, “captivated”, of delivering oneself from oneself in

order to be transported by one’s own passion and abandon oneself to that

of the other.

But the claim to be able to dispose of one’s body freely which appeared

concerning abortion and rape is a defensive reaction. Precisely because

it no more than translates and justifies a situation which puts everyone

on the defensive. The foetus, and even the capacity to have children, is

not the property of the mother, or even of the mother and father between

them. This vision is nothing but capitalist delirium, the defence of the

property of the body and its products. At a time such as this when what

is needed is the blowing up of registry offices, people are suggesting

that women keep their own names instead of taking those of their

husbands!!!

The problem of the desires and needs which are being suppressed here is

being put forward by the revolutionary movement. Despite what feminism

says, women should be brought to question to show that it is not a

matter of denouncing male desire, but of inciting the emergence of a

female desire which is not buried in passivity, and an identity which is

no longer inferior.

Germaine Greer speaks of the female eunuch. It is not only women who are

reduced to eunuchs, but it is true that female alienation is determined

by the way woman relates to her desire. Man can see the satisfaction of

his desire countered, woman cannot manage to find the language of hers.

She cannot desire frankly and openly. She places herself at the service

of man as the bearer of his child and as a more or less passive object

of desire, docile and resistant to change. The problem of woman’s desire

and social affirmation are absolutely inseparable.

This is obviously not purely social. The social is also a translation of

the physiological and biological. But it is absurd to believe that women

are condemned, either by their own nature or that of men, to behaving

passively. Obviously women have their own desires and activities and

no-one has ever succeeded in castrating them completely. It is not all

that simple; they have more possibilities to fall back on.

Women, of all times and in all societies, have managed to get round

their desires discreetly. There is no general law here. For example

some, thanks to the society in which they lived and their privileged

social position, never missed the opportunity to choose their lovers

openly.

The current difficulty in asserting their desires now that they have no

social legitimacy produces a contrasting and contradictory image of

woman: virgin or slut, mother or whore, absolutely innocent or

infinitely perverse, a symbol of gentleness or an example of spiteful

malevolence.

Women are dispossessed of the power which men monopolise. Yet women,

precisely because they cannot openly desire and manage their own affairs

and are at the service of others, are often more in search of power than

men. They live through their husbands, their children, their office boss

and want to possess them. This power, by its very nature pri-vate and

emotional, is obviously ridiculous — a blind alley where amorous

pleasure is lost.

Women can also take a castrating attitude towards men and children,

denying them and undermining their desire. If physical violence is very

rare, a product of dementia or an effect of jealousy or vengeance — like

the Czech veterinary student who recently anaesthetised and emasculated

her two rapists — castrating behaviour is far more common and engenders

various forms of impotence and inhibition.

Woman’s strength, her power, is that she can refuse herself, can “not

let herself be fucked”. It is only a step from denying herself as an

object of desire to denying the man the moment he advances his desire,

to degrading him and blaming his sexual impulses, therefore his need for

a woman: it is well known that “in every man there sleeps a pig”. Today

this reaction is being transferred into politics.

Some want to see “provocation” as the cause of rape, even to the extent

of denying the reality of it and transforming it into that of female bad

faith or the miniskirt. In contrast, others defend the right to dress as

they please, as if dress and appearance did not have a social meaning.

Rape is not independent of female attitudes, even though the problem

cannot be reduced to that of an immediate personal relationship between

the victim and her aggressor. Just as those who are burgled are not

necessarily those who possess and display most wealth. The attack is

made on the weak points...

Women who are raped, or even chatted up, are not necessarily those who

are most “sexy”. At the extreme, “provocation” at the level of anonymous

relationships can be seen as an expression of defiance and power to

discourage those looking for an easy target and only have recourse to

force because they themselves are unsure.

Men react to a frustrating situation and to a certain image of woman.

This image corresponds less to a particular real woman than to

provocatively eroticised representations of an omnipresent but

inaccessable woman who is universally on offer through the commodity

market. Representations which correspond to female aspirations and in

turn remodel them. Relationships are contemplative because of their

glamorous packaging as merchandise, as something consumable; but also

because the direct correlation between people who are constantly near

each other but meet on nothing and for nothing, tends to be reduced to

one of images. It is not only a question of consumerism playing on

narcissism and multiplying images of woman, it is also real women

reduced to images, assimilated to the consumable in the multiplicity and

anonymity of primarily visual relationships.

A whole female mode of behaviour is aimed at attracting the attention

and desire of others without being able or having to openly affirm

itself as need and appeal. This unconfessed and irresponsible behaviour

goes as far as to be surprised by the consequences it can arouse,

refusing to accept them as responses. Female seduction radiates in all

directions, and only feels responsible for that which it recognises. It

disdains some, but also sometimes resents those who were not aware they

were being aimed at.

But this still doesn’t get to the root of the problem. Women will still

claim that in dressing or behaving in such and such a way they are only

trying to please themselves and to be beautiful with no intention of

seducing. And in part this is true: their attitude is narcissistic. But

this narcissism needs to be supported by someone else’s gaze and

interest. They need to arouse desire in direct or disguised forms, but

with precisely no intention of responding. It’s a matter of reassuring

and valuing oneself while remaining inaccessible and conserving one’s

innocence.

In this case provocation and seduction are not steps towards initiating

a convergence of desires as they are often considered to be, but are an

expression of suppression, an incapacity to desire openly and frankly,

hence the indignation concerning advances made.

To have access to a woman a man must pay the price in sentimental

rubbish, or just plain rubbish, which is as much a concession to her

narcissism as to her need to be taken into consideration. This need for

consideration is all the more fundamental as woman is undervalued as a

person. It affirms itself as that of being taken into consideration as a

woman in default of being esteemed as an individual.

Respect a woman, show her attention and feeling and finally, a little

pressure, and access to sexual consumerism will be the reward! This

dissociation at the basis of courtship leads to platonic love, which

does not dare to make the woman descend from her pedestal; or to rape,

which wants to obtain consumption without having to pay the price.

Feminism and the mistrust it gives rise to are not the cold expression

of calculations between distinct and adverse interests in bad faith.

Under the guise of “justice”, “rights”, “defence” and “autonomy” it

touches the world of desire. This explains the reactions of

embarrassment, guilt, irony and aggressiveness beyond a proclaimed

reprobation of bad boys and sadists. Feminism comes to be seen as

hypocrisy, a double game, a perverse attitude. The accusation of rape

concretises this threat of seeing woman taking exception to and putting

an end to a game in which she was an accomplice from the start.

Through the feminist denunciation of rape, fear and the refusal of

desire itself is outlined, a fear and refusal which is not usually

stated openly, simply because it remains ambiguous and equivocal, but

which is occasionally crudely shown up by a few extremists. Those who

are caricatured or caricature themselves, scissors in hand.

Woman asks “love” to prove to her that she is not a sexual object, and

to reassure her. She wants to be loved, loved for herself and not for

“that” and demands feelings as an assurance. She contributes in this way

to re-inforcing the sexual as something separate, instead of dissolving

it in loving relationships. Tenderness and esteem only prepare for or

accompany sex and even constitute a form of barter: “I can have my arse

touched but not before I and my problems have been taken into

consideration!”. This attitude is not simply a heritage which could be

liquidated with new habits. It is also the attitude of these young

“emancipated” women who put it into practice, reassuring themselves with

a stream of lovers.

Anything that upsets this stratagem is a threat: not only rape and

brutal sexual propositions, but also any living desire that is

unexpected and clearly stated. Everything that escapes or disturbs

pre-established codes is considered rape or a danger.

By turning chatting-up, sexual propositions or leers into rape, one is

apparently denouncing a situation where woman is reduced to an object of

consumerism. But in reality it is the very act of desiring which is

being attacked. And the problem of woman is reduced to that of not being

harassed; thus her desires or her — negative — reactions to the desires

of others are denied.

To the chat-up we must oppose true encounter, to “voyeuristic” stares,

the expression of desire and communication. The enemy is not men and

their desires. The pickup is an immediate product of the city,

anonymity, solitude, the destruction of the possibilities of encounter.

The instigator himself uses defensive attitudes, false self-assurance

and a false disdain of women.

The predatory male, and in the extreme the rapist, is a nuisance or a

danger. But embarrassment or injury are above all rooted in all the

misery and solitude of the victims. They are provocations, injurious

responses painfully felt because they cannot fulfill, a caricature of

the hope of something else. If the rapist were Tarzan, perhaps he would

be forgiven. But the kerb crawler rarely has the appearance or the

manners of a Prince Charming. His “prey” sees her own misery reflected

in his.

Rape as an act, but more frequently as fantasy, is the product of the

form of relations between the sexes and the contradictions therein. It

is the politicisation of an old, more or less obsessional female fear, a

fear which covers a desire for sexuality which cannot acknowledge or

assert itself.

Rape fantasies and dreams about housebreaking express sexual fear

clothed in the fear of aggression. But this isn’t only fear, just as it

is not only passivity; fantasy is also an action. Desire takes form by

discharging responsibility and blame on to the aggressor. In his way the

latter embodies desire itself. He is desire, but coming in from the

outside. Just as the active male fantasy, and even rape itself, are

products of impotence, the passive fantasy in woman is also an

expression of her need for action; she acts out her desire and so deals

with the reality which refuses her this right.

In the active fantasy, the desire for and refusal of the other find an

outlet in domination and aggression. It is as much a question of

self-defence as it is of attack, self-protection from the risk and

anguish of refusal by the other with an attitude which makes neither

acceptation or refusal possible. Desires, fantasies and various forms of

sado-masochistic behaviour are not the product of a primary attitude

which has been superficially glossed over by civilisation, and is

tending to re — emerge. The image of the pre-historic woman as a prey

pulled along by the hair and who, one suspects, enjoys it. No, they are

the product of man’s liberation from his real needs, which then come

back to haunt him in a distorted form. Abandon, the submission which a

loving relationship implies, unaccepted because it is in contradiction

with a whole way of life, returns in the form of an exterior domination

that is violent, imposed, feared and desired at the same time.

The Story of 0 was openly presented by its author as the dream of an

emancipated woman. The success it met with and the disturbance it caused

are far more an expression of this modern state of affairs where passion

must be released and character armour shattered, than of an innate

archaic need to suffer and submit along with the complimentary desire to

dominate and torture, whether in dreams or at the cinema.

Susan Brownmiller, in her book Against Our Will, doubts that it was a

woman who wrote The Story of 0 and is annoyed with the complacency of

certain authors, even female ones like Anaïs Nin in her diary. Rape is

carried out “against our will”, and women should be cleansed of all

suspicion. All this female masochism, these aspirations for rape, are

just inventions.

Yet masochistic fantasies and fantasies of rape still flourish, although

with embarrassment, within the bosom of the feminist movement.

The feminist magazine ‘Emma” dedicated one of its issues to the question

“Our masochistic sexual fantasies”: “This documentation on masochism and

sexual fantasy has taken up our editorial group for weeks. The greatest

surprise for us was the great number of women who have such fantasies.

As soon as we began to talk about it, we discovered that some of the

women among us were also concerned. They only dared outline their

fantasies in a very hesitant way. Each was afraid of being judged by

someone who did not have any”. (“Emma”, September 9, 1977).

The editorial group quote studies carried out in the United States,

which demonstrate the frequency of masochistic fantasies: “... the

psychologist Barbara Hariton, who gained promotion on the strength of

it... found that 65 per cent of the women questioned by her had “erotic

fantasies” during sexual intercourse with their partners (men or women).

Thoughts of another man (or woman) were most prevalent, then visions of

rape, and in third place fantasies about “perversions”. Very frequently

women also imagined sexual intercourse with more than one man at the

same time or voyeuristic situations where they were observed or were

watching others”.

The American journalist Nancy Friday analysed a few thousand women’s

letters. She found that the majority of women’s sexual fantasies “are of

a masochistic nature”.

Robin Morgan, who wrote a book on the subject, says that during a

meeting on sexuality attended by a group of 80 feminists, one of the

participants admitted: “... it’s strange... we are feminists, but... I

sometimes have sexual fantasies which in some ways are masochistic,

and... I wonder if any-one here has already had the same sort of

experience. Perhaps they could raise a hand”. She fled from the room. A

deathly silence followed. Then, very slowly, each woman, one after the

other, raised her hand.

Robin Morgan, who herself has such fantasies, tries to change the nature

of them, to dream herself the dominator, to imagine herself the sultan,

professor, rapist, but that only works if she thinks of people of her

own sex. Hence the hypothesis that: “... I could raise myself above

them, but never above a man”. But: “That would be an unworthy

understanding of myself [...]. I forced myself not to have any more

fantasies, upon which my capacity to have orgasms decreased, which all

things considered was even more depressing. I capitulated when I became

afraid of becoming frigid, and felt like an alcoholic who goes back to

the bottle”. (Quoted in “Emma”).

All this is extremely disconcerting. How can these fantasies, which are

sometimes the only way to reach orgasm, be condemned without

appreciating that “they are to be found in strong opposition to the

dignity for which women are struggling today”? (“Emma”) In despair Robin

Morgan explains that ever since men have reversed matriarchy through

trickery, all this has had time to be registered in her cells. “Emma”

reaches the following conclusions: 1) Our fantasies are the product of

social conditions. They reflect the submission of woman in a male

dominated society. Fantasies say nothing about what is really desired.

The contrary can be the case. When a woman finds pleasure in imagining

herself being raped that in no way means she really desires to be raped.

It is more a case for diminishing women’s responsibility than

explanation. The fantasies are only reflections. Women are imagined to

be so malleable, poor dears! And they even go along with it. Fantasy is

obviously linked to social reality, but is an active means of

compensation.

A woman who dreams of being raped has every chance of being

disappointed, disillusioned, by real rape, firstly because one is rarely

raped by the man of one’s dreams, even if he is an anonymous figure.

Nevertheless, it is not possible to dissociate and oppose fantasy and

real desire in such a way. And what is expressed in fantasy will also

certainly have an echo in actual behaviour.

In order for woman to be exonerated, she is lent a monstrous alienation

and is presented as a passive receptacle of images. An absolute

dissociation between dream and real behaviour is pictured. In misery one

sees only misery and opposes it with a struggle for dignity. If one

places oneself on the terrain of dignity, it must be very difficult not

to despise those who in private find pleasure in this way, and in public

demonstrate a saintly fury against rapists.

These phantasms are a heritage of the millenarian oppression of women.

Is there not, rather, a link between this feminism and these fantasies?

Are the feminists not also dead against rapists because they dream of

rape and sadism? Everything is thrown in together in a dissociated way,

and opposing elements prop each other up, even if one is the overthrow

of the other.

In the United States an artist has started a course in masturbation for

women and has relaunched herself in the selling of suitable instruments.

All the same, the pupils still seem to have a need for some theatricals

and their fantasies predominantly take the form of rape. The social

relationship evacuated at the practical level returns to be set up as

imagination, and precisely in the form of law-breaking.

Masturbation is in fashion. It is another liberty to be conquered. Mrs

Shere Hite had a best seller in the USA with her book The Hite Report.

It is the result of an inquiry which in some ways is a summary of female

sexual poverty and her own intellectual frigidity. Her discovery is that

masturbation is the key which allows female sexuality to be understood

like male sexuality. She starts from the fact that many women do not

have orgasms through vaginal penetration but reach it through clitoral

masturbation. Moreover coitus does not seem so great as: “the fact is

that it is not realistic to expect a man to ensure total pleasure for

his partner at the same time as himself”. (Interview in “Reader’s Digest

Selection”, July 1977.)

From this follows some practical conclusions that a woman should know in

order to avoid letting herself be intimidated or forced to have sexual

relations. If a man has an erection, “nothing in nature, no physical

force makes him have this orgasm inside a vagina. The stimulation he

feels is coupled with the desire for orgasm and not for sexual relations

as such”. Masturbation can do him as much good and even: “there is no

imperative reason for him to have an orgasm at all”. (Hite Report). Thus

the woman would be no more than a wanking machine for the man. The

problem becomes knowing whether she wants to put him to the same use or

not.

Along the same lines, but in the “futurology” section, another American

philanthropist has proposed that the female population be radically

reduced in relation to the male population starting from the moment when

the sex of the foetus can be determined. Everything will be sorted out

thanks to the supply of ersatz women. Fucking machines will replace

pin-ball machines. But why such a barbarous and tortuous solution? To

solve the population explosion. Tilt!

Obviously we have nothing against masturbation and the various ways of

reaching orgasms which do not involve classic coitus, whether they bring

the fingers, the tongue or the ears into play. But what Hite and her

French counterpart Cabu, “ecology” tendency, question is the sexual

union itself: “Let’s stop fucking like primitive people, coitus is out

of date”. Hite wants to deliver us from this “cultural definition” and

Cabu from social conditioning. And they go so far as to speak of

humiliation and defilement. It would be interesting to know the results

of her erotica-ecological research for “just as intimate approaches”,

but ones which are clean.

Misery becomes arrogant and pedantic and does not hesitate to take a

liberatory tone even though it is not very good at disguising itself.

The church, society, tradition, present complete coitus as the normal

official form of sexual activity. First let us say there is often a gap

between the norm and reality as it is lived. Masturbation, coitus

interruptus and sodomy have all played an important role, primarily for

reasons of contraception.

But isn’t contemporary social conditioning leading to an essentially

masturbatory sexuality, without actually seeming to? Hence the

difference between the classic mode of sexual relations and practical

aspirations and behaviour.

First, there is the simple fact that adolescents generally experience

sexuality through masturbation and that sometimes this is the only form,

or the habitual form their sexual activity takes for a long time. Access

to sexual relations comes far later than sexual impulses. For reasons of

their living situation, fear of pregnancy, inhibition, adolescents

cannot have a satisfying sexual life at a time when sexual tension is

often at its strongest. Petting or masturbation substitutes coitus. The

prodigious career of the Hollywood kiss finds its explanation in this

contradictory situation which combines a mixture of prudishness and

eroticism. Thanks to contraception, amongst other things, this situation

has begun to thaw. This is where the feminists and ecologists come in

again. Masturbation is not an apprenticeship to sexual union. The

physical contact and means of excitation used are not the same and so

they prevent sexual development.

Hite says that a large number of American women (82 per cent of those

questioned) masturbate. No doubt men aren’t far behind. So masturbation

is not only a memory of adolescent practice, but is also present in

adult behaviour. The problem isn’t that people wank as well as screw.

The masturbatory character of sexuality is manifest — and there is

poverty in the sexual relationship itself.

Sexual union becomes the means of a quick and effective sleep-inducing

release. In order to make it work better and reach orgasm, one tunes

into one’s repertory of fantasies and screens one’s lover out.

This attitude is masturbatory because it is the fantasy that becomes the

source of excitation. It is a matter of a refusal, at the psychic level

and even at the physical one, where it also becomes an impossibility to

abandon oneself to one’s partner and one’s own sensations. The other is

used for masturbation. The consumerism of the sexual spectacle comes

from the same sort of thing.

It is not surprising that many women, because of their own blocks or

their partners’ behaviour, have no vaginal sensitivity or pleasure from

penetration. It is prevalent for women to ignore the existence and use

of the vaginal sphincter. The Americans, Masters and Johnson who

demonstrated that orgasm, even through penetration, was the result of

indirect stimulation of the clitoris, base an anti-frigidity therapy on

the contraction of this sphincter.

It would be mistaken to see sexual difficulties as a purely

physiological question which would respond to adequate exercise. And

orgasm in itself is not the solution which will sort everything out, be

it only because there are orgasms and orgasms. What we are up against is

the way the body, through impotence or absence of orgasm in screwing,

registers and fixates misery. But the reformists, seeing this misery as

a natural phenomenon, jump up saying we must pass over “prejudice” and

come to terms with it: solitary or reciprocal masturbation is a short

cut to pleasure, a remedy for impotence.

For Hite & Co., sexual relations are reduced to helping each other

towards pleasure, to rendering each other a service, naturally blending

the sauce with the indispensable tenderness. Reciprocal masturbation

would be the ideal. What escapes -them is the possibility of

self-abandonment in the other, a uniting of prick and cunt mixed in the

same pleasure.

The way this society investigates private life allows the devastation

produced by it to be isolated and its causes to be mystified. “Science”

offers remedies to the catastrophes so revealed, but its outlook carries

with it the very dissociations which are at the base of this

catastrophe. What we can discover is the depth of the social fracture

and how far it penetrates people’s intimacy.

If it is just a matter of the intensity of pleasure, then there can be

no doubt that the electronic feeling and sucking machine will win out

over masturbation nine times out often. If there isn’t a short circuit.

If the users don’t give up. If it doesn’t make them howl with despair as

it supplies them with its atrocious and inhuman pleasure. The question

is not that of pleasure as such but of encounter, recognition, the union

of desires and bodies, and of the harmony, pleasure and ecstasy which

follows. Happiness, sexual satisfaction, is not just a matter of

pleasure but also of the direction which that pleasure takes. In any

case the intensity of pleasure doesn’t boil down to mechanical friction.

It is in no way surprising that the Don Juans, the machos and

prickteasers prefer to wank; their behaviour is dissociated: on the one

hand the social relationship is reduced to conquest i.e. to narcissistic

reassurance and on the other to the satisfaction of needs.

The reverse of sexual freedom is revealed: dissatisfaction and

disillusionment. The more sexuality is set free, the more it is seized

on by a world of relationships of strength and competition. To fuck

someone is to take advantage of them, to exercise power over them —

hence the defensive reactions notably on the part of women who appear

most vulnerable. But such defensiveness and fragility exist perhaps even

more deeply in men for whom sexuality is valued as affirmation of self,

and where aggressive and defensive sexual mechanisms overlap. But all

this also demonstrates a need and a basis for a different kind of

relationship.

What the ideologists of the right to orgasms and equality in pleasure

fail to grasp is the complimentarity and union of the sexes. They don’t

even know that that’s what it’s made for. So, unaware of its use,

nothing seems to irritate them more than a phallus. Here it’s a matter

of La Petite difference et ses grandes consequences (Alice Schwarzer). B

Groult in Ainsi Soit-elle (So be she) simply sees the differences

between the sexes as no more than a question of a tap.

It was around this difference that Freud saw fear of castration in boys

and penis envy in girls; being reduced to a simple possession of a

prick, this difference is minimised or devalued by the feminists: it is

insignificant and is only a question of a tap. It matters little whether

the difference is great or small, it exists. But above all just to see a

difference is to be content with comparisons. Woman is reduced to a man

without a... denying her identity and the form of her desires and being

in a way more denigratary than Freud’s “phallocratism”.

A prick doesn’t separate a man from a woman, it’s what allows him to

unite himself with her. To see a prick as nothing but a tap is to deny

it as a symbol of desire, above all as desire in the flesh and in deed.

When talking of female attractiveness, do we have to say that what

distinguishes a woman from a man is a hole and bumps? Such miserable

plumbing and coach-building! The legal-political vision which only sees

differences and wants equality to reign goes together with a castrating

vision which ignores and refuses the world of desire. They put

individuals side by side, never together.

The cult of the phallus must be abolished. But where is this cult of the

phallus to be seen? Just as society practises a publicity cult of the

female body, so the poor phallus is left in the shade. The erection

becomes shameful, but not for want of putting the arse if not in a place

of honour, at least on the wall. Let us remind leftist moralists that

the female body is exhibited and reduced to an object of consumerism not

to stimulate erections but to sell goods.

The psychoanalysts very much in fashion today have revealed to us the

phallic character of the insignia of authority: sceptres, batons of

command... But the phallus is not accepted and respected because it is

maliciously masked. It’s not simply a game of prudish hide and seek: it

is denied and its meaning is inverted. The desire for power is not the

same as the power of desire. Let’s oppose phallocracy, yes, but because

we are against power and for the phallus.

The contradiction in feminism

Feminism feeds off the resistance that the capitalist movement for the

equality of women produces. That of the husband who doesn’t see why he

should give a hand with the housework when he gets home from work. That

of the woman who clings to a role and an image of femininity which is

less and less tenable. That of businesses which prefer to engage cheap

labour... In fact it is easy for it to draw up a list of cases where

women find themselves in inferior situations as regards wages, domestic

circumstances, etc. — where they are the ones receiving the blows. But

feminism doesn’t just feed off this resistance, it is itself resistance.

It is so precisely at the point where it imagines itself to be

avant-garde, subversive, as its real aim is legal and practical

equality.

Alongside and running through the practical demands against

discrimination which logically tend to liquidate the particular image

and status of women, there is a will in feminism to self-affirmation and

recognition of women as women. In other words to protect or restore

women’s status which is crumbling because capital is undermining its

foundations and because everybody is making room for themselves by

elbowing someone else. Feminists are demanding the consideration due to

women (“respect us as women”), for the innocence which is to be

attributed to them. They count on indul-gence towards women and their

contradictions, and are annoyed when they don’t get it.

Why this double attitude? Because on the level of the struggle for

equality, which is also that of the most ruthless competition, woman

usually finds herself in a position of inferiority, vulnerable at work,

in the street, in her sexual relations. This inferiority is due to her

education which is addressed less to the struggle than to the fact that

until Moulinex “liberate women” by bringing out hatcheries for foetuses

she will continue to exercise a maternal function. An inferiority which

arises out of her own nature and needs. It is not so much racism or an

anti-woman ideology as practical conditions which are hard for the

egalitarian ideology, State action or female charm to compensate for.

But feminism, unable to go beyond this to a point where woman will not

be limited to denying herself so as to “earn her living and her

independence”, works on two levels and confuses two contradictory

discourses. It also plunges into dishonesty. A male chauvinist

conspiracy is used to explain why, despite judicial proclamations and

modifications, women remain trapped. It is this being trapped that

feminism expresses, an immense malaise which appears to have no way out

and can only express itself through defensive attitudes that are

sometimes vicious and delirious, rarely justifiable.

It is all very well for feminism to denounce male authority. It must, in

fact, call on justice and the State if it wants to be effective. The

State is the arm of the weak. It alone can seem capable of ensuring

respect for those who are not able to make themselves respected. For

example, the idea of wages for housework could only come about through

State intervention. It is the same for more or less everything

concerning the defence of women. The militantism which organises

abortions, shelters battered women and supports unmarried mothers is

only a solution by proxy, by “red” nuns. It is, while defending oneself,

a re-enforcement of State intervention in private life. A glimpse at the

Soviet Union is instructive. It was there that Amalrik, arrested by the

KGB, got to know the “alcoholics” whose wives had denounced them. lt was

there that a woman was sentenced for passing on syphilis to two married

men.

Feminism proves to be incapable of understanding the evolution of the

female situation and women’s misery. By reducing the male situation to a

question of power and aiming to oppose men with women, it becomes

incapable of making a true critique of male behaviour.

The more it wants to make the capacity to live, feel and have a good

time a female prerogative, the more its language smells of lies. This

intellectualoid and insipid waffle hopes to evoke marvelous

understanding, indescribable female sensations. The past is regurgitated

and sets to war against abstractions, seeking allies in the palpitations

of the body, daisy chains, the earth-mother image, and modernist and

psychoanalytic stereotypes at the precise moment that it has no more to

say that is concrete. An incapacity to feel, love and communicate plays

with vagueness and concepts at the same time, hoping to bring about

change by passing off an empty package as lavish illusions.

In this way woman does nothing but make the most of, appropriate herself

of, the ghetto where she is confined in impotence, feelings, intuition

and “human relations”.

In a more active and aggressive way the taste for power, violence and

politics that would characterise males and is postured as the cause of

all ills is given free rein through feminist waffle. Waffle which

believes it is protecting itself from criticism in this way but which

reveals its essence: jealousy and competition with men, or rather a

caricaturised image of men.

Can feminism be reduced to “move along and make room for me”? Perhaps it

can for those Italian women who want 50 per cent of jobs to be assured

to women. But at another level, feminism as resistance to the movement

of capital is also claiming what it denounces. In its way and through

its inverted language it does no more than turn around and take up the

complaint of those who say that there are no longer any “real” men. The

enemy is patriarchal society, male authoritarianism. But where is this

authoritarian male, this master of the house who keeps wife and children

under his thumb?

The peasant family of yesteryear, where a man could exercise his

physical strength and his primary role in production to establish his

authority and direct the family, has practically dissolved even in rural

districts. Wage labour has made the man a “bread-winner” expelling both

himself and his productive activity from the sphere of the family. The

proletarian brings home money, but he is not the dominant figure even

inside his own family. His children do not see him toiling for the

family subsistence before their very eyes as was the case for peasant

families.

There has been a profound change in family relations and in the nature

of paternal and marital authority. There is economic dependence on the

father, but his authority appears ancillary and does not arise directly

from his function. As a proletarian he is subjected to authority in his

activity; he may have fits of despotism when he comes home, but he can

no longer seriously pass himself off as the master, which he

fundamentally is not. He is not at home in the factory, is he even in

the home? In the popular milieux it is frequently the woman who manages

the household expenses, giving back the man his pocket money. It is a

well known fact that 80 per cent of household purchases are made by

women. Housework has been compared to serfdom and in fact the wage

relation has had to rely on this submerged activity. But to say that

woman is the servant of men is just as true and just as false as to say

that she is the servant of the bourgeoisie. “My boss” is the popular

expression. But the man, unless he is someone is often more lost than

the woman, his life and activity have less meaning than that which is

left to the mother and housewife.

In bourgeois circles on the contrary, he has remained the master in the

house as in the social field. Roman law was reintegrated establishing

the man’s place as the head of the household over the woman and young

minors. So women and children find themselves far more restricted to a

dependent role than in the popular strata. Inheritances have to be

waited for. Today the young bourgeois rebel against daddy, sometimes

even confusing proletarian revolution with the liquidation of their

Oedipus complex. Note, however, and the Editions des Femmes know

something about it, that the possession of great fortunes often comes

back to women. Thus, according to “l’Expansion”, the two wealthiest

people in France are women: a widow and a single woman...

There is a general contradiction between reality as it is lived, and

what persists as the official figure of authority and strength as the

ideal to be attained: bishops, generals, foremen, astronauts and heads

of State are usually men.

Educational needs and parental influence in the family are increasingly

fulfilled by women. This reality is carried over into the school itself.

The father generally remains the figure of authority to whom recourse is

made and who, when the occasion arises, dispenses of punishment and

reprimands. But even here he can be perceived as an outsider, the

instrument of a power that is not his own — i.e. that of the mother who

uses the threat to keep the children in hand, and who then makes him act

it out.

This transformation is accompanied by a transformation in the nature of

authority itself. Women and rebellious youth, along with those who take

up their struggle, wage war against authority and he who incarnates it

in the family. And they certainly have good reason to fight against the

suffocation and constraints of the family. But in their search for a

culprit aren’t they magically trying to believe in an authority whose

suppression would solve everything, and which they simply lack?

The problem of the world and its dehumanisation is not just a problem of

authority. It is that of the existence of a whole host of constraints

which we are continually running up against. These constraints do not

suddenly appear as a part or consequence of our activity, but actually

prevent us from acting or even trying to. Not all of these constraints

are embodied in the human form — i.e. our movements are shackled, but

these shackles emerge neither as a product of a hu-man will nor are they

justified by one. There is no authority to which one can either submit

or oppose oneself. All that begins from a very young age. Parents who

show themselves to be incapable of coping and constituting a reassuring

reference point give meaning to the renunciations the child must

continually make and at the same time rob them of their rebellion. Love

and hate become entangled. Destructive and vindictive behaviour takes

over from authority and the legitimised discipline of times gone by. So

the urbanised children of today, with the benefits of school and

psychotherapy, find themselves far more restrained in taste and movement

than in the past. But then there is always Santa’s Grotto in the High

Street shops and the new teaching methods!

Little boys get no better deals than little girls. They are inhibited

simultaneously in their need for movement and exuberance and more

harshly repressed at the emotional level. They are reduced to nothing,

yet already they are being asked to prove to themselves and others that

they are something.

All this engenders contradictory developments; on the one hand there is

a rejection of authority often confined to its most artificial forms

while on the other there is an unconfessed but profound search for idols

to follow, paternal images to cling to, and more or less moth-eaten

certitudes.

In its inverted form, this becomes: “it’s all the fault of... men,

bosses...”. There is a desperate search for culprits to blame for our

misery, while we are living precisely in a period in which, — and that

is a sign of its revolutionary content — those “responsible” are already

being liquidated, even if their position is still being argued over.

Wage labour has therefore taken men out of the family, but it hasn’t

stopped at recentralising or decentralising them in front of the

television set. Women have also been dragged into wage labour. A part of

the function they once carried out is now being undertaken by paid

workers. Creches are being opened. Militants just ask that there should

be more of them. Others demand that their staff be mixed and that

parents participate in their running. People employ their radicality

where they can!

The extension of female wage-labour in its way constitutes a true

liberation of woman, tearing her away from the narrow world of a life of

housework, and offering her finan-cial independence. But it is a

liberation of the capitalist kind. A movement which does not at all

abolish the inferior status of the female condition, but reproduces it

in other forms.

Wage differentials have often been insisted upon. The system uses women

as underpaid, underskilled labour, playing on what is still a

supplementary wage, which generally means a secondary contribution to

the family that is assessed in relation to the women’s domestic

function. Less attention is paid to the nature of the jobs women get and

their particular alienation.

The division of men and women into different sorts of paid jobs does not

come about by chance. The great mass of women are used in the field of

human relations (teaching, nursing, etc, or as unskilled labour,

cleaners, doing assembly work, etc), in branches where capital

overdevelops as it atomises the social fabric. Women abandon their role

as mothers to go and look after children in creches, schools and

hospitals; they abandon their role as wives to “lend a hand” as typists,

secretaries and girl fridays.

So their activity is not really that of a producer, i.e. it does not

consist of conceiving or making things. It is an activity that consists

of taking care of people.

The peasant woman looked after her children, but through “creative”

activity. Human beings develop, change, discover themselves and place

themselves in relation to other people through action and the albeit

fragmented modelling of the environment.

So, as capital takes charge of the whole of social life beyond that of

production as such, seeing to the management of human material and

developing female wage-labour in the process, a paradox emerges. Women

are constrained as never before in emotional and social life which are

considered separate worlds.

Feminism as we have seen is a falsified representation of a real

movement that has been accomplished by capital. Its real and positive

role, like that of ecology, is that it brings problems to light albeit

in a disguised or inverted way. It is up to the communist movement and

to theoretical quest to discover their true dimension and resolution.

The fundamental weakness is that general change and discontent are

reduced to the woman’s question. The opposition between men and women

is, and is becoming increasingly more so, but one instance of a general

system of friction which the hierarchical structure of society is

producing by playing on inequalities and oppositions that are

continually being reproduced while the old norms are being liquidated.

There is a general crisis of identity and a general crisis of human

relations. This crisis, starting from real fixations and their

distorting amplification by the media, was presented for a whole period

as a generation gap, and now it is being transformed into opposition

between men and women.

The depth of the proletarian movement manifests itself to the extent

that women participate in it. It is when things get serious, touching

deep into daily life and daily needs, that women with their scorn of the

political game (apart from a few notable exceptions, from Catherine II

of Russia to Margaret Thatcher), throw themselves into the fray. The

women who accuse their striking husbands of irresponsibility and an

incapacity to bring money home for the family in an effort to protect a

certain security, or who are very docile at work, are the same women who

turn round and call their husbands cowards when their radicality leaps

ahead as the struggle starts to upturn the social order.

The problem for communism is not the achievement of equality between men

and women. It is not a matter of democratising the couple or the family

and normalising day to day relationships. It is not a matter of setting

up rotas for domestic tasks or hunting down fascism in the kitchen and

the bedroom.

Communism attacks the roots of the family institution. It does not

dissolve the family, it is capitalism that is emptying it of all meaning

and taking the education of children from it, entrusting it to

specialised institutions. As communism generalises free access to goods,

and amongst other things transforms and increases the space available

for living in, it destroys the foundations and economic function of the

family. Also, as it is the realisation of the human community, it

destroys the need for a refuge within that community.

The emancipation of women and children is guaranteed as there will be no

constraints on life other than mutual attraction. It is on this basis

that their relationships will develop. The basis will not only be

relationships of affection; people will associate to act, to move

around, etc. The generalisation of the community will be such that

individuals will not have to cling to this or that partner or have a

fundamental fear of losing them. A mother (or father) will not have to

submit to economic dependence in order to feed their children. The

latter will not grow up in the smothering atmosphere of the family, they

will no longer be the property of their parents to be fought over in the

case of divorce. They will learn to look after themselves more easily

and more quickly than they do today.

However, all relations of domination and conflict will not simply

disappear because of this. But these will not be institutionalised and

perpetuated within a power structure because the institutional framework

and economic constraints which make this possible will have disappeared.

Capital takes account of people according to their function. It

profoundly ignores the differences between the sexes therefore. In the

economic and political sphere this becomes an ornament which regulates

advantages and disadvantages in the promotion stakes. This is carried

over outside serious social matters to become marginalised in leisure

activities.

Economic necessity is a great leveller. But the difference between the

sexes remains. And communism cannot dismiss it, but on the contrary will

recognise it in full as it is the social expression of human needs

beyond economics. Men and women have different needs and a need for this

difference.

Those who see everything back to front think that education is at the

root of everything, needs to be changed, and that by educating girls and

boys in the same way and offering them a similar image of father and

mother things will take care of themselves. An imbecilic intent to

level, an incapacity to play and to enjoy the difference that brings the

sexes closer together.

It is this teacher-pupil relationship with its falseness and colonialism

and imposition of norms that must be liquidated, particularly because it

is a matter of active, militant and progressive pedagogy. Subtle

relationships need to be cultivated wherein each individual, starting

from their own biological peculiarities, discovers their particular

social identity, their own desire and that of the opposite sex.

Communism will not set up new rules and taboos to keep men and women in

limited roles. It will not constrain people in any way and no doubt men

and women will carry out similar functions, but they will not be reduced

to that function and from this simple fact everyone will act their own

way, which does not exclude their sexual nature. Neither will it fall

back into the old division of labour.

The sexual difference is excluded from the world of work today, even

though it reappears through the back door and capitalism is using it to

divide, using wage differentials so as to underpay what is no more than

labour. It is enough to make the partisans of equal and uniform misery

rise up in anger. Communism however, which liquidates work as a separate

sphere and activity, will occupy itself with reuniting the two sexes,

along with children, in the same activities, but without de-sexing them.

Competitive sport offers a caricature of the capitalist universe, where

the pleasure of physical effort and responding to a challenge ends up

lost in the tuning of winning machines. Now that women have joined the

race there is no hesitation about denaturing them by stuffing them with

male hormones so that they’ll go faster. What separates communism from

such repugnant practices is evident.