Men were strong and women were weak because men could
walk and women could not. Men were independent and
women were dependent because men could walk and women
could not. Men were virile because women were crippled.
This atrocity committed against Chinese women is only one
example of the systematic sadism acted out on the bodies of
women to render us opposite to, and the negatives of, men.
We have been, and are, whipped, beaten, and assaulted; we
have been, and are, encased in clothing designed to distort our
bodies, to make movement and breathing painful and difficult;
we have been, and are, turned into ornaments, so deprived of
physical presence that we cannot run or jump or climb or even
walk with a natural posture; we have been, and are, veiled, our
faces covered by layers of suffocating cloth or by layers of
make-up, so that even possession of our own faces is denied us;
we have been, and are, forced to remove the hair from our
armpits, legs, eyebrows, and often even from our pubic areas,
so that men can assert, without contradiction, the positivity of
their own hairy virility. We have been, and are, sterilized
against our will; our wombs are removed for no medical reason; our clitorises are cut off; our breasts and the whole musculature of our chests are removed with enthusiastic abandon.
This last procedure, radical mastectomy, is eighty years old. I
ask you to consider the development of weaponry in the last
eighty years, nuclear bombs, poisonous gases, laser beams,
noise bombs, and the like, and to question the development of
technology in relation to women. Why are women still being
mutilated so promiscuously in breast surgery; why has this
savage form of mutilation, radical mastectomy, thrived if not
to enhance the negativity of women in relation to men? These
forms of physical mutilation are
female by negating our very bodies, by destroying them.
In the bizarre world made by men, the primary physical
emblem of female negativity is pregnancy. Women have the
capacity to bear children; men do not. But since men are
positive and women are negative, the inability to bear children
is designated as a positive characteristic, and the ability to
bear children is designated as a negative characteristic. Since
women are most easily distinguished from men by virtue of
this single capacity, and since the negativity of women is always established in opposition to the positivity of men, the childbearing capacity of the female is used first to fix, then to
confirm, her negative or inferior status. Pregnancy becomes a
physical brand, a sign designating the pregnant one as authentically female. Childbearing, peculiarly, becomes the form and substance of female negativity.
Again, consider technology in relation to women. As men
walk on the moon and a man-made satellite approaches Mars
for a landing, the technology of contraception remains criminally inadequate. The two most effective means of contraception are the pill and the I. U. D. The pill is poisonous and the I. U. D. is sadistic. Should a woman want to prevent conception, she must either fail eventually because she uses an ineffective method of contraception, in which case she risks death through childbearing; or she must risk
