but in media, murders it. The economic value given to a woman’s
body, whether high or low, murders it. The keeping of a woman
as a toy or ornament or domesticated cunt murders it. The need to
be a mother so that one is not perceived as a whore murders it.
The requirement that one bear babies murders it. The fact that the
sexuality of the female is predetermined and that she is forced to be
what men say she is murders sexual intelligence: there is nothing
for her to discern or to construct; there is nothing for her to find
out except what men will do to her and what she will have to pay if
she resists or gives in. She lives in a private world—even a street
corner is a private world of sexual usage, not a public world of
honest confrontation; and her private world of sexual usage has
narrow boundaries and a host of givens. No intelligence can func
tion in a world that consists fundamentally of two rules that by
their very nature prohibit the invention of values, identity, will,
desire: be fucked, reproduce. Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeited for women.
*
I respect and honor the needy woman who, to
procure food for herself and child, sells her body to
some stranger for the necessary money; but for that
legal virtue which sells itself for a lifetime for a
home, with an abhorrence of the purchaser, and
which at the same time says to the former, “I
am holier than thou, ” I have only the supremest
contempt.
Victoria Woodhull, 1874
The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one
thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other. And
there is no doubt that the wife envies the whore—or Marabel Morgan’s ladies would not be wrapping themselves in Saran Wrap or wearing black boots with lacy neon nighties—and that the whore
envies the domesticity of the wife—especially her physical sheltering and her relative sexual privacy. Both categories of women—
specious as the categories finally turn out to be—need what men
have to give: they need the material solicitude of men, not their
cocks but their money. The cock is the inevitable precondition;
without it there is no man, no money, no shelter, no protection.
With it there may not be much, but women prefer men to silence,
exile, to being pariahs, to being lone refugees, to being outcasts:
defenseless. Victoria Woodhull—the first woman stockbroker on
Wall Street, the first woman to run for president of the United
States (1870), the publisher of the first translation of the
under the notoriously repressive Comstock Law (1872)*—crusaded
against the material dependency of women on men because she
knew that anyone who bartered her body bartered her human dignity. She hated the hypocrisy of married women; she hated the condition of prostitution, which degraded both wives and whores;
