Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

in a male-imagined world, and our lives are circumscribed by

the limits of male imagination. Those limits are very severe.

As women, we learn fear as a function of our so-called

femininity. We are taught systematically to be afraid, and we

are taught that to be afraid not only is congruent with femininity, but also inheres in it. We are taught to be afraid so that we will not be able to act, so that we will be passive, so that we

will be women— so that we will be, as Aristotle put it so

charmingly, “afflicted with a natural defectiveness. ”

In Woman Hating, I described how this process is embodied

in the fairy tales we all learn as children:

The lessons are simple, and we learn them well.

Men and women are different, absolute opposites.

The heroic prince can never be confused with Cinderella, or

Snow-white, or Sleeping Beauty. She could never do what he

does at all, let alone better.. . .

Where he is erect, she is supine. Where he is awake, she is

asleep. Where he is active, she is passive. Where she is erect, or

awake, or active, she is evil and must be destroyed.. . .

There are two definitions of woman. There is the good woman.

She is a victim. There is the bad woman. She must be destroyed.

The good woman must be possessed. The bad woman must be

killed, or punished. Both must be nullified.

. . . There is the good woman. She is the victim. The posture

of victimization, the passivity of the victim demands abuse.

Women strive for passivity, because women want to be good.

The abuse evoked by that passivity convinces women that they

are bad.. . .

Even a woman who strives conscientiously for passivity sometimes does something. That she acts at all provokes abuse. The abuse provoked by that activity convinces her that she is bad.. . .

The moral of the story should, one would think, preclude a

happy ending. It does not. The moral of the story is the happy

ending. It tells us that happiness for a woman is to be passive,

victimized, destroyed, or asleep. It tells us that happiness is for

the woman who is good—inert, passive, victimized—and that a

good woman is a happy woman. It tells us that the happy ending

is when we are ended, when we live without our lives or not at

all. 4

Every organ of this male supremacist culture embodies the

complex and odious system of rewards and punishments which

will teach a woman her proper place, her allowable sphere.

Family, school, church; books, movies, television; games,

songs, toys— all teach a girl to submit and conform long before she becomes a woman.

The fact is that a girl is forced, through an effective and

pervasive system of rewards and punishments, to develop precisely the lack of qualities which will certify her as a woman.

In developing this lack of qualities, she is forced to learn to

punish herself for any violation of the rules of behavior that

apply to her gender class. Her arguments with the very definitions of womanhood are internalized so that, in the end, she argues against herself— against the validity of any impulse

toward action or assertion; against the validity of any claim to