Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

rightful and inevitable sexual conquest of a man’s male friends

and leads to innumerable cases of rape. Women are raped

often by the male friends of their male friends. Men should

understand that they jeopardize women’s lives by participating

in the rituals of privileged boyhood. Rape is also effectively

sanctioned by men who harass women on the streets and in

other public places; who describe or refer to women in objectifying, demeaning ways; who act aggressively or contemptuously toward women; who tell or laugh at misogynistic jokes; who write stories or make movies where women are raped and

love it; who consume or endorse pornography; who insult

specific women or women as a group; who impede or ridicule

women in our struggle for dignity. Men who do or who endorse these behaviors are the enemies of women and are implicated in the crime of rape. Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence

against us.

I have been describing, of course, emergency measures, designed to help women survive as atrocity is being waged against us. How can we end the atrocity itself? Clearly, we

must determine the root causes of rape and we must work to

excise from our social fabric all definitions, values, and behaviors which energize and sanction rape.

What, then, are the root causes of rape?

Rape is the direct consequence of our polar definitions of

men and women. Rape is congruent with these definitions;

rape inheres in these definitions. Remember, rape is not committed by psychopaths or deviants from our social norms—

rape is committed by exemplars of our social norms. In this

male-supremacist society, men are defined as one order of

being over and against women who are defined as another,

opposite, entirely different order of being. Men are defined as

aggressive, dominant, powerful. Women are defined as passive, submissive, powerless. Given these polar gender defini­

tions, it is the very nature of men to aggress sexually against

women. Rape occurs when a man, who is dominant by definition, takes a woman who, according to men and all the organs of their culture, was put on this earth for his use and gratification. Rape, then, is the logical consequence of a system of definitions of what is normative. Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake—it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it. As long as these definitions remain intact—

that is, as long as men are defined as sexual aggressors and

women are defined as passive receptors lacking integrity—

men who are exemplars of the norm will rape women.

In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is, by definition, intensely and rigidly phallic. A man’s identity is located in his conception of himself

as the possessor of a phallus; a man’s worth is located in his

pride in phallic identity. The main characteristic of phallic

identity is that worth is entirely contingent on the possession

of a phallus. Since men have no other criteria for worth, no

other notion of identity, those who do not have phalluses are

not recognized as fully human.

In thinking about this, you must realize that this is not a

question of heterosexual or homosexual. Male homosexuality

is not a renunciation of phallic identity. Heterosexual and

homosexual men are equally invested in phallic identity. They