keep women in—in the sex class. Prostitution is the all-encompassing condition, the body trapped in barter, the body
imprisoned as commodity. W ith respect to the circle of crim es—
rape, battery, reproductive exploitation, economic exploitation—
the crimes can be placed anywhere in the circle in any order. T hey
are the crimes of the sex-class system against women; they are the
crimes that keep women women in an immovable system of sex
hierarchy. T hey are crimes committed against women as women.
Economic exploitation is a specific of women’s condition; it is not a
sex-neutral political category into which the experience of women
sometimes falls. Women are segregated in job ghettos as women;
the lower pay of women is systematic; the sale of sex is a funda
mental dimension of economic exploitation, whether in prostitution, marriage, or in the marketplace; when women move in large numbers into high-status jobs (male jobs), the jobs lose status (become female jobs); doing the same or comparable jobs as men, women get paid less. Economic exploitation is a key crime against
women but it is not the same economic exploitation that men experience. The construction of causality among the crimes or even the establishment of sequentiality (in which order the crimes appeared
in history or prehistory) is ultimately irrelevant. It does not matter
whether rape came first and caused the systematic economic degradation of women, or whether economic exploitation created conditions in which the production of children got the value it now has, or whether men batter because of jealousy over women’s reproductive capacity, or whether the etiology of rape is in the superior physical strength of men to women discovered in acts of battery
that later became sanctioned and systematic. One can follow the
circle around in either direction (see drawing 2) and construct marvelous theories of causality or sequentiality, most of which are plausible and interesting; and one can try to prioritize the political
importance of the crimes. But what must matter now is the condition of women now: these crimes are now its features, its characteristic events, its experiential absolutes, its inescapable attacks on women as women. These crimes are real, systematic, and define
the condition of women. The relationships between them do not
matter so much as the fact that they are facts: equal, essential,
basic facts. Seen in this light, prohibition against lesbianism, for
instance, is not the same kind of equal, essential, basic fact, nor is
lesbianism an obvious or sure road to freedom. Lesbianism is a
transgression of rules, an affront; but its prohibition is not a basic
constituent part of sex oppression and its expression does not substantively breach or transform sex oppression. There is no state of being or act of w ill, including lesbianism, that changes the circle:
there is no state of being or act of will that protects a woman from
D R A WI NG 2. THE C I R C L E OF
C R I M E S A G A I N S T WOME N
the basic crimes against women as women or puts any woman outside the possibility of suffering these crimes. Great wealth does not put a woman outside the circle of crimes; neither does racial supremacy in a racist social system or a good job or a terrific heterosexual relationship with a wonderful man or the most liberated (by any standard) sex life or living with women in a commune in a
pasture. The circle of crimes is also not changed by how one feels
about it. One can decide to ignore it or one can decide it does not
apply for any number of reasons, emotional, intellectual, or practical: nevertheless it is there and it applies.
Going back to the whole model—the circle, the pornography at
the center of it, the all-encompassing wall of prostitution that circumscribes it—it does not matter whether prostitution is perceived as the surface condition, with pornography hidden in the deepest
recesses of the psyche; or whether pornography is perceived as the
