Right-wing Women

Ordeal, “to settle for the smallest imaginable triumphs, the absence

of pain or the momentary lessening of terror. ” 23 The woman in

prostitution is often in prostitution because her ideal is physical

survival— surviving the pimp, surviving poverty, having nowhere

to go.

Women’s social condition is built on a simple premise: women

can be fucked and bear babies, therefore women must be fucked

and bear babies. Sometimes, especially among the sophisticated,

“penetrated” is substituted for “fucked”: women can be penetrated,

therefore women must be penetrated. This logic does not apply to

men, whichever word is used: men can be fucked, therefore men

must be fucked; men can be penetrated, therefore men must be

penetrated. This logic applies only to women and sex. One does

not say, for instance, women have delicate hands, therefore women

must be surgeons. Or women have legs, therefore women must

run, jump, climb. Or women have minds, therefore women must

use them. One does learn, however, that women have sex organs

that must be used by men, or the women are not women: they are

somehow less or more, either of which is bad and thoroughly discouraged. Women are defined, valued, judged, in one way only: as women—that is, with sex organs that must be used. Other parts of

the body do not signify, unless used in sex or as an indicator of

sexual availability or desirability. Intelligence does not count. It

has nothing to do with what a woman is.

Women are born into the labor pool specific to women: the labor

is sex. Intelligence does not modify, reform, or revolutionize this

basic fact of life for women.

Women are marked for marriage and prostitution by a wound

between the legs, acknowledged as such when men show their

strange terror of women. Intelligence neither creates nor destroys

this wound; nor does it change the uses of the wound, the woman,

the sex.

Women’s work is done below the waist; intelligence is higher.

Women are lower; men are higher. It is a simple, dull scheme; but

women’s sex organs in and of themselves are apparently appalling

enough to justify the scheme, make it self-evidently true.

The natural intelligence of women, however expanded by what

women manage to learn despite their low status, manifests in surviving: enduring, marking time, bearing pain, becoming numb, absorbing loss—especially loss of self. Women survive men’s use of them —marriage, prostitution, rape; women’s intelligence expresses

itself in finding ways to endure and find meaning in the unendurable, to endure being used because of one’s sex. “Sex with men, how can I say, lacks the personal, ” 24 wrote Maryse Holder in Give

Sorrow Words.

Some women want to work: not sex labor; real work; work that

men, those real humans, do for a living wage. T hey want an honest wage for honest work. One of the prostitutes Kate M illett interviewed made $800 a week in her prime. “With a P h. D. and after ten years’ experience in teaching, ” M illet wrote, “I was permitted

to make only $60 a w eek. ” 25

Women’s work that is not marriage or prostitution is mostly