surface condition, with prostitution being its wider, more important, hidden base, the largely unacknowledged sexual-economic necessity of women. (See drawings 3 and 4. ) Each has to be understood as intrinsically part of the condition of women—pornography being what women are, prostitution being what women do, the circle of crimes being what women are for. Rape, battery, economic exploitation, and reproductive exploitation require pornography as female metaphysics so as to be virtually self-justifying, virtually invisible abuses; and they also require the wall of prostitution confining women (meaning that whatever women do is within the bounds of prostitution) so that women are always and absolutely accessible. The heart of pornography and the wall of prostitution mirror each other in that both are meant to mean—and concretely do mean in the male system—that women deserve the
crimes that define their condition, that those crimes are responses
to what women are and what women do, that the crimes committed against women define the condition of women correctly— in accordance with what women are and what women do.
T he meaning of this description of what women’s subordination
is, how women are kept subordinate, how that subordination is
acted out on women system atically, is simple for feminists: breaking the circle up, breaking down the w all, annihilating the system ’s heart, are what we must do. The meaning for antifeminists is also
simple: whatever strengthens or vitalizes any aspect of the model is
of great practical value in keeping women subordinate. Antifeminists can disagree strategically (for instance, on whether pornography should be public or private) without disagreeing in principle on what is necessary to keep women encapsulated in subjection (the
use of pornography, its cultural and psychic centrality whether it is
public or private, the use of women as pornography in public and
in private). But one cannot be a feminist and support any element
in this model: there are no exceptions— not civil liberties lawyers
or liberals or sym pathetic men or so-called feminists who indulge
in using the label but evading the substance. Antifeminist politics
come in many guises, but a vivid memory of what the condition of
women is— w hat crimes articulate it, what is at its heart, what is
the impenetrable boundary beyond which women do not pass—
provides a standard for discerning antifeminism in any political
stance. No one can defend or give aid and comfort to that which
keeps women subordinate and at the same time claim to be acting
in behalf of women’s liberation: feminism is not a lifestyle or an
attitude or a feeling of vague sym pathy with women or an assertion
of modernity. Antifeminism saturates the political spectrum from
Right to Left, liberal to conservative, reactionary to progressive.
Antifeminism is resistance to the liberation of women from the sex-
class system , that resistance expressed in constructing political defenses of the constituent parts of sex oppression. This antifeminism is a vital part of programs, values, ideologies, philosophies, arguments, actions, economic, sexual, and social manipulations that are the substance of most political discourse and organizing. Antifeminism is a potent expression of reaction, backlash, and suppression;
DRAWING 3. PROSTITUTION AS
THE MATERIAL REALITY;
PORNOGRAPHY AS
THE UNDERLYING IDEOLOGY
THE C I R C L E OF C R I M E S A G A I N S T WO M E N
P R O S T I T U T I O N
DRAWING 4. PORNOGRAPHY AS
THE SURFACE PHENOMENON:
PROSTITUTION AS
THE UNDERLYING SYSTEM
