condition of women, is the purpose of feminism: which means that feminism requires a most rigorous definition of
what those crimes are so as to determine what that condition is.
This definition cannot be compromised by a selective representation of the sex class based on sentim entality or wishful thinking.
This definition cannot exclude prudes or sluts or dykes or mothers
or virgins because one does not want to be associated w ith them.
To be a feminist means recognizing that one is associated with all
women not as an act of choice but as a matter of fact. The sex-class
system creates the fact. When that system is broken, there w ill
be no such fact. Feminists do not create this common condition
by making alliances: feminists recognize this common condition
because it exists as an intrinsic part of sex oppression. The fundamental knowledge that women are a class having a common condition— that the fate of one woman is tied substantively to the fate of all women— toughens feminist theory and practice. That fundamental knowledge is an almost unbearable test of seriousness.
There is no real feminism that does not have at its heart the tempering discipline of sex-class consciousness: knowing that women share a common condition as a class, like it or not.
W hat is that common condition? Subordinate to men, sexually
colonized in a sexual system of dominance and submission, denied
rights on the basis of sex, historically chattel, generally considered
biologically inferior, confined to sex and reproduction: this is the
general description of the social environment in which all women
live. But what is the real map of that environment? Which crimes
create the topography? Drawing 1 shows the basic condition of
E CONOMI C
R A P E
EXPLOI TATI ON
P R O S TI TU T I O N
DRAWING 1. THE CONDITION OF WOMEN
women, a lateral view of the female bottom of sex hierarchy. Rape,
battery, economic exploitation, and reproductive exploitation are
the basic crimes committed against women in the sex-class system
in which they are devalued because they are women. The crimes
are points on a circle because it is a closed system , from nowhere to
nowhere. These specific crimes are each committed against huge
percentages of the female population at any given time. Rape, for
instance, consists not only of police-blotter rape but also marital
rape, incestuous abuse of girls, any sex that is coerced. Battery is
estimated to have happened to 50 percent of married women in the
United States alone. All housewives are economically exploited; all
working women are. Reproductive exploitation includes forced
pregnancy and forced sterilization. There are few female lives not
touched by one, two, or three of these crimes and significantly
determined by all of them. At the heart of the female condition is
pornography: it is the ideology that is the source of all the rest; it
truly defines what women are in this system — and how women are
treated issues from what women
