Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

might be too. But, while these stories always enable us to feel

a kind of collective pride, they also allow us to mystify particular acts of courage and to deify those who have committed them— we say, oh, yes, she was like that, but I am not; we say,

she was such an extraordinary woman, but I am not. So I

Delivered at Queens College, City University of New York, March 12, 1975;

Fordham University, New York City, December 16, 1975.

decided to try to think through fear and courage in another

way— in a more analytical, political way.

I am going to try to delineate for you the sexual politics of

fear and courage— that is, how fear is learned as a function of

femininity; and how courage is the red badge of masculinity.

I believe that we are all products of the culture in which we

live; and that in order to understand what we think of as our

personal experiences, we must understand first how the culture informs what we see and how we understand. In other words, the culture in which we live determines for us to an

astonishing degree how we perceive, what we perceive, how

we name and value our experiences, how and why we act at

all.

The first fact of this culture is that it is male supremacist:

that is, men are, by birthright, law, custom, and habit, systematically and consistently defined as superior to women.

This definition, which postulates that men are a gender class

over and against women, inheres in every organ and institution of this culture. There are no exceptions to this particular rule.

In a male supremacist culture, the male condition is taken

to be the human condition, so that, when any man speaks—

for instance, as an artist, historian, or philosopher— he speaks

objectively— that is, as someone who has, by definition, no

special bone to pick, no special investment which would slant

his view; he is somehow an embodiment of the norm. Women,

on the other hand, are not men. Therefore women are, by

virtue of male logic, not the norm, a different, lower order of

being, subjective rather than objective, a confused amalgam of

special bones to pick which make our perceptions, judgments,

and decisions untrustworthy, not credible, whimsical. Simone

de Beauvoir in the preface to The Second Sex described it this

way:

In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not. . . like that of

two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the

neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate

human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the

negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.. . .

“The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities, ”

said Aristotle; “we should regard the female nature as afflicted

with a natural defectiveness. ” And St. Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an “imperfect man, ” an “incidental”

being. . .