man must. We might say that in pornography the whips, the
chains, and the other paraphernalia of brutality are security
blankets which give the lie to the pornographic claim that fucking issues from manhood like light from the sun. But in life, even the systematized abuse of women and the global subjugation of women to men is not sufficient to stem the terror inherent for the male in the act of fucking.
Third, it is necessary to understand that what
by the male as authentic pleasure is the affirmation of his own
identity as a male. Each time he survives the peril of entering
the female void, his masculinity is reified. He has proven both
that he is not her and that he is like other hims. No pleasure
on earth matches the pleasure of having proven himself
positive and not negative, a man and not a woman, a bona
fide member of the group which holds dominion over all other
living things.
Fourth, it is necessary to understand that under the sexual
system of male positivity and female negativity, there is literally nothing in the act of fucking, except accidental clitoral friction, which recognizes or actualizes the real eroticism of
the female, even as it has survived under slave conditions.
Within the confines of the male-positive system, this eroticism
does not exist. After all, a negative is a negative is a negative.
Fucking is entirely a male act designed to affirm the reality
and power of the phallus, of masculinity. For women, the
pleasure in being fucked is the masochistic pleasure of experiencing self-negation. Under the male- positive system, the masochistic pleasure of self-negation is both mythicized and
mystified in order to compel women to believe that we experience fulfillment in selflessness, pleasure in pain, validation in self-sacrifice, femininity in submission to masculinity. Trained
from birth to conform to the requirements of this peculiar
world view, punished severely when we do not learn masochistic submission well enough, entirely encapsulated inside the boundaries of the male-positive system, few women ever experience themselves as real in and of themselves. Instead, women are real to themselves to the degree that they identify
with and attach themselves to the positivity of males. In being
fucked, a woman attaches herself to one who is real to himself
and vicariously experiences reality, such as it is, through him;
in being fucked, a woman experiences the masochistic pleasure of her own negation which is perversely articulated as the fulfillment of her femininity.
Now, I want to make a crucial distinction— the distinction
between truth and reality. For humans, reality is
is whatever people at a given time believe it to be. In saying
this, I do not mean to suggest that reality is either whimsical or
accidental. In my view, reality is always a function of politics
in general and sexual politics in particular— that is, it serves
the powerful by fortifying and justifying their right to domination over the powerless. Reality is whatever premises social and cultural institutions are built on. Reality is also the rape,
the whip, the fuck, the hysterectomy, the clitoridectomy, the
mastectomy, the bound foot, the high-heel shoe, the corset, the
make-up, the veil, the assault and battery, the degradation and
mutilation in their concrete manifestations. Reality is enforced
by those whom it serves so that it appears to be self-evident.
Reality is self-perpetuating, in that the cultural and social institutions built on its premises also embody and enforce those premises. Literature, religion, psychology, education, medicine, the science of biology as currently understood, the social sciences, the nuclear family, the nation-state, police, armies,
