dreadful disease
with the pill, or suffer agonizing pain with the I. U. D. — and, of
course, with either of these methods, the risk of death is also
very real. Now that abortion techniques have been developed
which are safe and easy, women are resolutely denied free
access to them. Men require that women continue to become
pregnant so as to embody female negativity, thus confirming
male positivity.
While the physical assaults against female life are staggering, the outrages committed against our intellectual and creative faculties have been no less sadistic. Consigned to a negative intellectual and creative life, so as to affirm these capacities in men, women are considered to be mindless; femininity is
roughly synonymous with stupidity. We are feminine to the
degree that our mental faculties are annihilated or repudiated.
To enforce this dimension of female negativity, we are systematically denied access to formal education, and every assertion of natural intelligence is punished until we do not dare to trust our perceptions, until we do not dare to honor our
creative impulses, until we do not dare to exercise our critical
faculties, until we do not dare to cultivate our imaginations,
until we do not dare to respect our own mental or moral
acuity. Whatever creative or intellectual work we do manage
to do is trivialized, ignored, or ridiculed, so that even those
few whose minds could not be degraded are driven to suicide
or insanity, or back into marriage and childbearing. There are
very few exceptions to this inexorable rule.
The most vivid literary manifestation of this pathology of
female negation is found in pornography. Literature is always
the most eloquent expression of cultural values; and pornography articulates the purest distillation of those values. In literary pornography, where female blood can flow without the real restraint of biological endurance, the ethos of this murderous male-positive culture is revealed in its skeletal form: male sadism feeds on female masochism; male dominance is
nourished by female submission.
In pornography, sadism is the means by which men establish their dominance. Sadism is the authentic exercise of power which confirms manhood; and the first characteristic of manhood is that its existence is based on the negation of the female
— manhood can only be certified by abject female degradation, a degradation never abject enough until the victim’s body and will have both been destroyed.
In literary pornography, the pulsating heart of darkness at
the center of the male-positive system is exposed in all of its
terrifying nakedness. That heart of darkness is this— that sexual sadism actualizes male identity. Women are tortured, whipped, and chained; women are bound and gagged, branded
and burned, cut with knives and wires; women are pissed on
and shit on; red-hot needles are driven into breasts, bones are
broken, rectums are tom, mouths are ravaged, cunts are savagely bludgeoned by penis after penis, dildo after dildo— and all of this to establish in the male a viable sense of his own
worth.
Typically in pornography, some of this gruesome cruelty
takes place in a public context. A man has not thoroughly
mastered a woman— he is not thoroughly a man— until her
degradation is publicly witnessed and enjoyed. In other words,
a-’ a man establishes dominance he must also publicly establish
ownership. Ownership is proven when a man can humiliate a
woman in front of, and for the pleasure of, his fellows, and
still she remains loyal to him. Ownership is further established
