and a female standard; and it insists at the same time that we are all
just human beings, right now, as things stand, within this sex-class
system, so that no special attention should be paid to social phenomena on account of sex. W ith respect to rape, for instance, the feminist starts out with a single standard of freedom and dignity:
everyone, women as well as men, should have a right to the integrity of their own body. Feminists then focus on and analyze the sex-class reality of rape: men rape, women are raped; even in those
statistically rare cases where boys or men are raped, men are the
rapists. Antifeminists start out with a double standard: men conquer, possess, dominate, men take women; women are conquered, possessed, dominated, and taken. Antifeminists then insist that
rape is a crime like any other, like mugging or homicide or bur
glary: they deny its sex-specific, sex-class nature and the political
meaning undeniably implicit in the sexual construction of the
crime. Feminists are accused of denying the common humanity of
men and women because feminists refuse to fudge on the sex issue
of who does what to whom, how often, and why. Antifeminists
refuse to acknowledge that the sex-class system repudiates the
humanity of women by keeping women systematically subject to
exploitation and violence as a condition of sex. In analyzing the
sex-class system, feminists are accused of inventing or perpetuating
it. Calling attention to it, we are told, insults women by suggesting
that they are victims (stupid enough to allow themselves to be victimized). Feminists are accused of being the agents of degradation by postulating that such degradation exists. This is a little like considering abolitionists responsible for slavery, but all is fair when love is war. In ignoring the political significance of the sex-class
system except to defend it when it is under attack, antifeminists
suggest that “we’re all in this together, ” all us human beings, dif-
ferent-but-together, a formulation that depends on lack of clarity
for its persuasiveness. Indisputably, we’re all in rape together,
some of us to great disadvantage. Feminism especially requires a
rigorous analysis of sex class, one that is ongoing, stubborn, persistent, unsentimental, disciplined, not placated by fatuous invocations of a common humanity that in fact the sex-class system itself suppresses. The sex-class system cannot be undone when those
whom it exploits and humiliates are unable to face it for what it is,
for what it takes from them, for what it does to them. Feminism
requires precisely what misogyny destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power. Despite the impossibility of it, there is such bravery: there are such women, in some periods
millions upon millions of them. If male supremacy survives every
effort of women to overthrow it, it will not be because of biology
or God; nor will it be because of the force and power of men per
se. It will be because the will to liberation was contaminated, un
dermined, rendered ineffectual and meaningless, by antifeminism:
by specious concepts of equality based on an evasion of what the
sex-class system really is. The refusal to recognize the intrinsic despotism of the sex-class system means that that despotism is inevitably incorporated into reform models of that same system: in this, antifeminism triumphs over the w ill to liberation. The refusal to
recognize the unique abuses inherent in sex labor (treating sex labor as if it were sex-neutral, as if it were not intrinsically part of sex oppression and inseparable from it) is a function of antifeminism; the acceptance of sex labor as appropriate labor for women marks the trium ph of antifeminism over the w ill to liberation. The
sentimental acceptance of a double standard of human rights, responsibilities, and freedom is also the triumph of antifeminism over the w ill to liberation; no sexual dichotomy is compatible with real
liberation. And, most important, the refusal to demand (with no
