Right-wing Women

it is protean; it is easy, popular, and always fashionable in one

form or another.

Antifeminism is also operating whenever any political group is

ready to sacrifice one group of women, one faction, some women,

some kinds of women, to any element of sex-class oppression: to

pornography, to rape, to battery, to economic exploitation, to reproductive exploitation, to prostitution. There are women all along the male-defined political spectrum, including on both extreme

ends of it, ready to sacrifice some women, usually not themselves,

to the brothels or to the farms. The sacrifice is profoundly antifeminist; it is also profoundly immoral. Men mostly accept the disposition of women under the sex-class system and they mostly accept the crimes committed against women: but sometimes the

status of women is addressed, those crimes are addressed, in political discourse. Whenever some women are doctrinally delivered to sex exploitation, the political stance is corrupt. Virtually all ideologies are implicitly antifeminist in that women are sacrificed to higher goals: the higher goal of reproduction; the higher goal of

pleasure; the higher goal of a freedom antipathetic to the freedom

of women; the higher goal of better conditions for workers not

women; the higher goal of a new order that keeps the sex exploitation of women essentially intact; the higher goal of an old order that considers the sex exploitation of women a sign of social stability (woman’s in her place, all’s right with the world). Some women are sacrificed to a function—fucking, reproducing, house-cleaning, and so on. A political promise is made, and kept, that

some women will do some things so that all women must not do all

things. Women accept the sacrifice of other women to that which

they find repugnant: a seduction of antifeminism that outdoes worship of female good in getting female adherents because it is more practical. Men all along the political spectrum manipulate this seduction with great skill. Some women are sacrificed by race or class: kept doing some kinds of work that other women will then

not have to do. Supporting the use of some women in any area of

sex exploitation is the w illful sacrifice of women on an altar of sex

abuse and it is a political repudiation of the sex-class consciousness

basic to feminism: it is— whoever does it— antifeminism. And then

there is the psychological use of the same reactionary strategy: some

women, of course, like being. . . (beaten, raped, exploited, bought

and sold, forced to have sex, forced to have children). Antifem inism is also a form of psychological warfare, and of course some women do like. . . Women intend to save themselves when sacrificing some women, but only the freedom of all women protects any woman. T his is practical and true because of the nature of sex

oppression. Men, who use power against women in sex exploitation, know that it is practical and true: which is w hy it is a fundamental strategy of antifeminism to encourage the sacrifice of some women by a ll women.

*

Now look at the world as right-wing women see it. T hey live in

the same world as all women: a world of sex segregation and sex

hierarchy; a world defined by the crimes of rape, battery, economic and reproductive exploitation; a world circumscribed by prostitution; a world in which they too are pornography. T hey see

the system of sex oppression— about which they are not stupid—as

closed and unalterable. It is unchangeable to them, whether they

take as their authority God or man. If sex oppression is real, absolute, unchanging, inevitable, then the views of right-wing women are more logical than not. M arriage is supposed to protect them

from rape; being kept at home is supposed to protect them from

the castelike economic exploitation of the marketplace; reproduction gives them what value and respect they have and so they must increase the value of reproduction even if it means increasing their

own vulnerability to reproductive exploitation (especially forced