Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

manifest this investment differently in one area—the choice of

what men call a “sexual object”—but their common valuation

of women consistently reinforces their own sense of phallic

worth.

It is this phallocentric identity of men that makes it possible

— indeed, necessary—for men to view women as a lower

order of creation. Men genuinely do not know that women are

individual persons of worth, volition, and sensibility because

masculinity is the signet of all worth, and masculinity is a

function of phallic identity. Women, then, by definition, have

no claim to the rights and responsibilities of personhood.

Wonderful George Gilder, who can always be counted on to

tell us the dismal truth about masculinity, has put it this way:

. . unlike femininity, relaxed masculinity is at bottom

empty, a limp nullity.. . . Manhood at the most basic level can

be validated and expressed only in action. ”40 And so, what

are the actions that validate and express this masculinity:

rape, first and foremost rape; murder, war, plunder, fighting,

imperializing and colonializing — aggression in any and every

form, and to any and every degree. All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.

As women, of course, we do not have phallic identities, and

so we are defined as opposite from and inferior to men. Men

consider physical strength, for instance, to be implicit in and

derived from phallic identity, and so for thousands of years we

have been systematically robbed of our physical strength. Men

consider intellectual accomplishment to be a function of phallic identity, and so we are intellectually incompetent by their definition. Men consider moral acuity to be a function of phallic identity, and so we are consistently characterized as vain, malicious, and immoral creatures. Even the notion that

women need to be fucked— which is the a priori assumption of

the rapist— is directly derived from the specious conviction

that the only worth is phallic worth: men are willing, or able,

to recognize us only when we have attached to us a cock in the

course of sexual intercourse. Then, and only then, we are for

them real women.

As nonphallic beings, women are defined as submissive,

passive, virtually inert. For all of patriarchal history, we have

been defined by law, custom, and habit as inferior because of

our nonphallic bodies. Our sexual definition is one of “masochistic passivity” : “masochistic” because even men recognize their systematic sadism against us; “passivity” not because we

are naturally passive, but because our chains are very heavy

and as a result, we cannot move.

The fact is that in order to stop rape, and all of the other

systematic abuses against us, we must destroy these very defi­

nitions of masculinity and femininity, of men and women. We

must destroy completely and for all time the personality structures “dominant-active, or male” and “submissive-passive, or female. ” We must excise them from our social fabric, destroy

any and all institutions based on them, render them vestigial,