They, the masculinists, have told us that they write about
the human condition, that their themes are the great themes—
love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself. They have told
us that our themes—love, death, heroism, suffering, history
itself— are trivial because we are, by our very nature, trivial.
I renounce masculinist art. It is not art which illuminates
the human condition— it illuminates only, and to men’s final
and everlasting shame, the masculinist world— and as we look
around us, that world is not one to be proud of. Masculinist
art, the art of centuries of men, is not universal, or the final
explication of what being in the world is. It is, in the end,
descriptive only of a world in which women are subjugated,
submissive, enslaved, robbed of full becoming, distinguished
only by carnality, demeaned. I say, my life is not trivial; my
sensibility is not trivial; my struggle is not trivial. Nor was my
mother’s, or her mother’s before her. I renounce those who
hate women, who have contempt for women, who ridicule and
demean women, and when I do, I renounce most of the art,
masculinist art, ever made.
As feminists, we inhabit the world in a new way. We see the
world in a new way. We threaten to turn it upside down and
inside out. We intend to change it so totally that someday the
texts of masculinist writers will be anthropological curiosities.
What was that Mailer talking about, our descendants will ask,
should they come upon his work in some obscure archive.
And they will wonder—bewildered, sad— at the masculinist
glorification of war; the masculinist mystifications around killing, maiming, violence, and pain; the tortured masks of phallic heroism; the vain arrogance of phallic supremacy; the
impoverished renderings of mothers and daughters, and so of
life itself. They will ask, did those people really believe in
those gods?
Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great
river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless
stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based
on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which
will take the great human themes— love, death, heroism,
suffering, history itself— and render them fully human. It may
also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now
that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new
theme, one as great and as rich as those others— should we
call it “joy”?
We cannot imagine a world in which women are not experienced as trivial and contemptible, in which women are not demeaned, abused, exploited, raped, diminished before we are
even bom— and so we cannot know what kind of art will be
made in that new world. Our work, which does full honor to
those centuries of sisters who went before us, is to midwife
that new world into being. It will be left to our children and
their children to live in it.
