Woman Hating

Heterosexuality, which is properly defined as the ritualized behavior built on polar role definition, and the social institutions related to it (marriage, the family, the Church, ad infinitum) are “human nature. ”

As individuals, we experience ourselves as the center of whatever social world we inhabit. We think that we are free and refuse to see that we are functions of our particular culture.

We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist’s maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.

To sum up, Story of O is a story of psychic cannibalism, demonic possession, a story which posits men and women as being at opposite poles of the universe — the survival of one dependent on the absolute destruction of the other. It asks, like many stories, who is the most powerful, and it answers: men are, literally over women’s dead bodies.

They mark her as an owned object and in no way symbolize the passage into maturity and freedom. The same might be said of the conventional wedding ring.

There are two definitions of woman. There is the good woman. She is a victim. There is the bad woman. She must be destroyed. The good woman must be possessed. The bad woman must be killed, or punished. Both must be nullified.

She is desirable in her beauty, passivity, and victimization. She is desirable because she is beautiful, passive, and victimized.

Her other persona, the evil mother, is repulsive in her cruelty. She is repulsive and she must be destroyed. She is the female protagonist, the nonmale source of power which must be defeated, obliterated, before male power can fully flower. She is repulsive because she is evil. She is evil because she acts.

The analysis of sexism in this book articulates clearly what the oppression of women is, how it functions, how it is rooted in psyche and culture. But that analysis is useless unless it is tied to a political consciousness and commitment which will totally redefine community.

The women’s movement has not dealt with this bread-and-butter issue, and that is its most awful failure. There has been little recognition that the destruction of the middle-class lifestyle is crucial to the development of decent community forms in which all people can be free and have dignity.

As the most obvious male Christ figure of our time, he should know