Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

Thus, humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself

but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous

being. 1

We can locate easily the precise way in which we are

“afflicted with a natural defectiveness. ” As Freud so eloquently put it two millennia after Aristotle:

[Women] notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly

visible and of large proportions, [and] at once recognize it as the

superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ-----

. . . After a woman has become aware of the wound to her

narcissism, she develops, like a scar, a sense of inferiority. When

she has passed beyond her first attempt at explaining her lack of

a penis as being a punishment personal to herself and has realized that that sexual character is a universal one, she begins to share the contempt felt by men for a sex which is the lesser in so

important a respect. . . 2

Now, the terrible truth is that in a patriarchy, possession of

a phallus is the sole signet of worth, the touchstone of human

identity. All positive human attributes are seen as inherent in

and consequences of that single biological accident. Intellect,

moral discernment, creativity, imagination— all are male, or

phallic, faculties. When any woman develops any one of these

faculties, we are told either that she is striving to behave “like

a man” or that she is “masculine. ”

One particularly important attribute of phallic identity is

courage. Manhood can be functionally described as the capacity for courageous action. A man is born with that capacity—

that is, with a phallus. Each tiny male infant is a potential

hero. His mother is supposed to raise and nurture him so that

he can develop that inherent capacity. His father is supposed

to embody in the world that capacity fully realized.

Any work or activity that a male does, or any nascent talent

that a male might have, has a mythic dimension: it can be

recognized by male culture as heroic and the manhood of any

male who embodies it is thereby affirmed.

The kinds and categories of mythic male heroes are numerous. A man can be a hero if he climbs a mountain, or plays football, or pilots an airplane. A man can be a hero if he

writes a book, or composes a piece of music, or directs a play.

A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug

addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A

man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because

he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is “sensitive”; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a

man’s life will make him a hero to some group of people and

has a mythic rendering in the culture— in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.

It is precisely this mythic dimension of all male activity

which reifies the gender class system so that male supremacy is

unchallengeable and unchangeable. Women are never confirmed as heroic or courageous agents because the capacity for courageous action inheres in maleness itself—it is identifiable

and affirmable only as a male capacity. Women, remember,

are “female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities. ” One of the

qualities we must lack in order to pass as female is the capacity for courageous action.