freedom is inimical to the situation of women because women must
always bargain. Since men are dominant, aggressive, controlling,
powerful because of God or nature, the weak women must always
have something to trade to get the protection of these strong men.
Either the woman is too weak to care for herself or she is too weak
to fend off men; in either case, she needs a male protector. If she
needs a male protector, she must not only bargain to get him; she
must continuously bargain to keep him or to keep him from abusing the power he has over her. This compromises any possibility of self-determination for her. The dependence of women on men, the
inability of women to have and to manifest a self-sustaining and
self-determined integrity, and the fundamental definition of a
woman as a whore by nature are all established as being implicit in
the biological relationship between men and women: implicit and
unalterable. This feature of the male-dominant model is unique to
it. Neither the separate-but-equal model nor the woman-superior
model puts women in a metaphysically defined, biologically determined relationship of prostitution to men. (Perhaps this virtue of the male-dominant model accounts for its ubiquity. ) The bargain
women must make because men are biologically dominant is
pointed to whenever a woman achieves. The bargain is searched
for—what did she sell to whom to enable her to do whatever she
did? The necessity for bargaining is used to stop rebellion. The
bargain necessitated by his greater aggression, strength, and power
is the principal reason for refuting the possibility of her claim to
independence in this model of antifeminism. He is dominant; she
must submit. Submission in the face of greater strength, greater
aggression, greater power, is unavoidable. She is simply not strong
enough to be on her own— especially not if he wants her because
she is not strong enough or aggressive enough to stop him from
taking her. So each woman has to make a deal with at least one of
the strong ones for protection; and the deal she makes, being based
on her inferiority, originating in it, acknowledges the truth and
inevitability of that inferiority. In needing to bargain because she is
too weak not to, she proves that antifeminism— the repudiation of
her freedom— is grounded in simple biological necessity, biological
common sense, biological realism.
Because the male is presumed dominant by natural right or divine w ill, he is supposed to have an exclusive authority in the realm of public power. The antifeminism predicated on natural
male dominance also maintains that men naturally dominate government, politics, economics, culture, state and m ilitary policy—
that men naturally assert their dominance by running all social and
political institutions. The token woman here and there in no w ay
interferes w ith the effectiveness of virtually all-male clubs of power
in erasing any hope of real authority or influence for women. One
woman on the Supreme Court, one woman in the Senate, a woman
prime minister, an occasional woman head of state, are not so
much role models as rebukes to economically demoralized women
who are supposed to accept the tokens as what they too could have
been if only they themselves had been different— better, smarter,
richer, prettier, not such schlemiels. Token women must go out of
their w ay not to offend the male sense of fem ininity, but by their
