Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

among ourselves— to experience it, to create from it, and also

to deprive men of occasions for reifying the lie of manhood

over and against us. I believe that ridding ourselves of our

own deeply entrenched masochism, which takes so many tortured forms, is the first priority; it is the first deadly blow that we can strike against systematized male dominance. In effect,

when we succeed in excising masochism from our own personalities and constitutions, we will be cutting the male life line to power over and against us, to male worth in contradistinction to female degradation, to male identity posited on brutally enforced female negativity— we will be cutting the

male life line to manhood itself. Only when manhood is dead

— and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it— only then will we know what it is to be free.

N otes

1. Feminism, Art, and My Mother Sylvia

1. Joseph Chaikin, The Presence of the Actor (New York: Atheneum,

1972), p. 126.

2. Theodore Roethke, “The Poetry of Louise Bogan/’ On the Poet and

His Craft: Selected Prose o f Theodore Roethke, ed. Ralph J. Mills (Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 1965), pp. 133-134.

2. Renouncing Sexual “Equality”

1. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970).

2. Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter, eds., Revelations: Diaries of

Women (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 143-144.

3. Remembering the Witches

1. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, trans.

M. Summers (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971), p. 44.

2. Ibid., p. 43.

3. Ibid., p. 47.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., p. 121.

4. The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door

1. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity, ” Women and Analysis, ed. Jean Strouse

(New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974), p. 90.

2. The Jerusalem Bible (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,

1966), pp. 243-244.

3. Ibid., p. 245.

4. Cited by Carol V. Horos, Rape (New Canaan, Conn.: Tobey Publishing Co., Inc., 1974), p. 3.

5. Cited by Andra Medea and Kathleen Thompson, Against Rape (New

York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1974), p. 27.

6. Horos, op. cit., p. 6.

7. William Matthews, The Ill-Framed Knight: A Skeptical Inquiry into the

Identity of Sir Thomas Malory (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1966), p. 17.

8. Medea and Thompson, op. cit., p. 13.

9. “Forcible and Statutory Rape: An Exploration of the Operation and

Objectives of the Consent Standard, '* The Yale Law Journal, LXII (December 1952), pp. 52-83.