Right-wing Women

percentages toward single women. If the Human Life Amendment or Statute passes, or any similar legislation, both the intrauterine device and the low-dosage birth control pill will become illegal. They will be considered

abortifacients because they are known to stop the fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall, thereby “killing” it. If effective contraception is once again unavailable—so that both contraception and abortion are inaccessible—I suspect the percentage of married women having abortions will once again skyrocket.

nomic conservatism, religious conservatism, over to conforming to

the dictates of authority and power, over to sexual compliance,

over to obedience—because as long as the sex-class system is intact, huge numbers of women will believe that the Right offers them the best deal: the highest reproductive value; the best protection against sexual aggression; the best economic security as the economic dependents of men w ho must provide; the most reliable

protection against battery; the most respect. Left and centrist philosophies, programs, and parties tend to vicious condescension with respect to women’s rights; they lie, and right-wing women are

quite brilliant at discerning the hypocrisy of liberal support for

women’s rights. Right-wing women do not buy the partial truths

and cynical lies that constitute the positions of various liberal and

so-called radical groups on women’s rights. They see antifeminism,

though they call it simple hypocrisy. They are outraged by it.

What is it that right-wing women see, then, when they look at

feminists? The Right, Left, and center have firm bases of power in

that they all come out of and serve and are led by the top class in

the sex-class system: men. They are all profoundly opposed to the

destruction of the sex-ckss system. Feminists want to destroy the

sex-class system but feminists come out of and serve and are led by

the bottom class in the sex-class system: women. The feminism of

women cannot match the power, the resources, the potency of the

antifeminism of the whole male political spectrum. Looking for a

way out of the sex-class system, a way beyond the boundary of

prostitution, a way around the crimes of rape, battery, economic

exploitation, and reproductive exploitation, a way out of being pornography, right-wing women look at feminists and they see w om en: inside the same boundary, victims of the same crimes, women who

are pornography. Their response to what they see is not a sense of

sisterhood or solidarity— it is a self-protective sense of repulsion.

The powerless are not quick to put their faith in the powerless.

The powerless need the powerful, especially in sex oppression be­

cause it is inescapable, everywhere: there are no free zones, free

countries, underground railways away from it. Because feminism

is a movement for liberation of the powerless by the powerless in a

closed system based on their powerlessness, right-wing women

judge it a futile movement. Frequently they also judge it a malicious movement in that it jeopardizes the bargains with power that they can make; feminism calls into question for the men confronted

by it the sincerity of women who conform without political resistance. Since antifeminism is based in power (the sex-class power of men along the whole political spectrum) and feminism is based in

powerlessness, antifeminism effectively turns feminism into a political dead end. It is the antifeminism of Right, Left, center, and all variations thereof, that makes the situation of women hopeless:

there is no hope of escape, no hope of freedom, no hope for an end

to sex oppression, because all power-based political parties, programs, and philosophies abhor the liberation of women as a basis of action, as a real goal, even as an idea. Being doomed by a reactionary political stance to social subordination is not the same as being doomed by God or nature to metaphysical inferiority—a crucial