Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

This goes right to the core of female invisibility in this culture. No matter what we do, we are not seen. Our acts are not witnessed, not observed, not experienced, not recorded, not

affirmed. Our acts have no mythic dimension in male terms

simply because we are not men, we do not have phalluses.

When men do not see a cock, they do not in fact see anything;

they perceive a lack of qualities, an absence. They see nothing

of value since they only recognize phallic value; and they cannot value what they do not see. They may fill in the empty spaces, the absence, with all sorts of monstrous imaginings—

for instance, they may imagine that the vagina is a hole filled

with teeth— but they cannot recognize a woman for who she is

as a discrete, actual being; nor can they grasp what a woman’s

body is to her, that is, that she experiences herself as actual,

and not as the negative of a man; nor can they understand that

women are not “empty” inside. This last male illusion, or hallucination, is as interesting as it is shocking. I have often heard men describe the vagina as “empty space”—the notion being

that the defining characteristic of women from the top of the

legs to the waist is internal emptiness. Somehow, the illusion is

that women contain an internal space which is an absence and

which must be filled—either by a phallus or by a child, which

is viewed as an extension of the phallus. Erik Erikson’s rendition of this male fantasy sanctified it for psychologists. Erikson wrote:

No doubt also, the very existence of the inner productive space

exposes women early to a specific sense of loneliness, to a fear of

being left empty or deprived of treasures, of remaining unfulfilled

and of drying up. . . in female experience an “inner space” is

at the center of despair even as it is the very center of potential

fulfillment. Emptiness is the female form of perdition. . . [it is]

standard experience for all women. To be left, for her, means to

be left empty. . . Such hurt can be re-experienced in each

menstruation; it is a crying to heaven in the mourning over a

child; and it becomes a permanent scar in the menopause. 8

It is no wonder, then, that men recognize us only when we

have a phallus attached to us in the course of sexual intercourse or when we are pregnant. Then we are for them real women; then we have, in their eyes, an identity, a function, a

verifiable existence; then, and only then, we are not “empty. ”

The isolation of this male pathology, by the way, sheds some

light on the abortion struggle. In a society in which the only

recognizable worth is phallic worth, it is unconscionable for a

woman to choose to “be empty inside, ” to choose to be “deprived of treasures. ” The womb is dignified only when it is the repository of holy goods—the phallus or, since men want

sons, the fetal son. To abort a fetus, in masculinist terms, is to

commit an act of violence against the phallus itself. It is akin

to chopping off a cock. Because a fetus is perceived of as

having a phallic character, its so-called life is valued very

highly, while the woman’s actual life is worthless and invisible

since she can make no claim to phallic potentiality.

It may sound peculiar, at first, to speak of fear as the absence of courage. We know, all of us, that fear is vivid, actual, physiologically verifiable— but then, so is the vagina. We live