control reproduction without the mass complicity of women. Reduced to its simplest elements, the old misogyny was expressed by the ancient Greek Hipponax of Ephesus: “The two days in a
woman’s life a man can best enjoy are when he marries her and
when he carries her dead body to the grave. ” 15 In the misogyny of
the future—in the coming gynocide—he will have one day he can
best enjoy: “when he carries her dead body to the grave. ” We come
after, as George Steiner wrote; and we are women. We know what
men can do.
6
Antifeminism
some men
would rather see us dead than imagine
what we think of them/
if we measure our silence by our pain
how could the words
any word
ever catch up
what is it we could call equal
Ntozake Shange, “Slow Drag, ” from
Feminism is a much-hated political philosophy. T his is true all
along the male-defined, recognizable political spectrum from far
Right to far Left. Feminism is hated because women are hated.
Antifeminism is a direct expression of m isogyny; it is the political
defense of woman hating. This is because feminism is the liberation movement of women. Antifeminism, in any of its political colorations, holds that the social and sexual condition of women essentially (one w ay or another) embodies the nature of women,
that the w ay women are treated in sex and in society is congruent
with what women are, that the fundamental relationship between
men and women— in sex, in reproduction, in social hierarchy— is
both necessary and inevitable. Antifeminism defends the conviction that the male abuse of women, especially in sex, has an im
plicit logic, one that no program of social justice can or should
eliminate; that because the male use of women originates in the
distinct and opposite natures of each which converge in what is
called “sex, ” women are not abused when used as women—but
merely used for what they are by men as men. It is admitted that
there are excesses of male sadism—committed by deranged individuals, for instance—but in general the massive degradation of women is not seen to violate the nature of women as such. For
instance, a man’s nature would be violated if anyone forcibly penetrated his body. A woman’s nature is not violated by the same event, even though she may have been hurt. A man’s nature would
not provoke anyone to forcibly penetrate his body. A woman’s nature does provoke such penetration—and even injury is no proof that she did not want the penetration or even the injury itself, since
it is her nature as a woman to desire being forcibly penetrated and
forcibly hurt. Conservatively estimated, in the United States a
woman is raped every three minutes, and in each and every rape
the woman’s nature is at issue first and foremost, not the man’s act.
Certainly there is no social or legal recognition that rape is an act of
political terrorism.
