tends toward it; women are the preferred victims of record. Only
having children moderates men’s sexual usage of women: use them
up and throw them away, fuck them to death, killing them softly.
If women are not needed to run the country or write the books or
make the music or to farm or engineer or dig coal or fix plumbing
or cure the sick or plav basketball, what are women needed for? If
the absence of women from all these areas, from all areas, is not
perceived as loss, emptiness, poverty, what are women for? Right-
wing women have faced the answer. Women are for fucking and
having children. Fucking gets you dead, unless you have children
too. Homosexuality—its rise in public visibility, attempts to socially legitimize or protect it, a sense that it is attractive and on the move and winning not only acceptance but practitioners—makes
women expendable: the one thing women can do and be valued for
will no longer be valued, cannot be counted on to be that bedrock
of women’s worth. This is true of both lesbianism and male homosexuality, in that both negate women’s reproductive value to men; but male homosexuality is especially terrifying because it suggests
a world without women altogether—a world in which women are
extinct. “[I]n sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, ” God cursed
Adam’s woman (Genesis 3: 16)— she is referred to as “the woman”
until she and Adam are expelled from Eden and Adam names her
Eve “because she was the mother of all living” (Genesis 3: 20). On
expulsion from Eden man knew sex leading to death; and woman
knew childbearing in sorrow and pain, on which her well-being,
such as it is, still depends. The sorrow was apparently avoided
altogether by Phyllis Schlafly, who waxes euphoric on having children: “None of those measures of career success [traveling to “exciting faraway places, ” having authority over others, winning, or earning a fortune] can compare with the thrill, the satisfaction, and
the fun of having and caring for babies, and watching them respond and grow under a mother’s loving care. More babies m ultiply a woman’s jo y . ” 15 The thrill, the endlessly m ultiplying joy, was not in God’s original intention; and indeed, it is unlikely that
Schlafly has outwilled him. In the sorrow of having children there
is the recognition that one’s humanity is reduced to this, and on
this one’s survival depends. Being a woman is this, or it is unspeakably worse than this. Homosexuality brings up for women the barrenness of not even having this. A woman has committed
her life to bringing forth children in order to have a life of dignity
and worth; she has found the one w ay in which she is absolutely
necessary; and then, that is gone as an absolute. It must be an
absolute, because there are women who stake their lives on it as an
absolute; it is certainly what women have had to count on. Everything that women have to gain from homosexuality— and women have a great deal to gain from it: less forced penetration of themselves, for instance— is obliterated by the fear of losing what value women have, a fear conjured up by homosexuality in women
whose own right to life is in having children. Despite all the happy
talk of the total women, there is a fierce anxiety there: if men did
not need babies, and women to have them, these bright wives
would be shivering on street corners like the other fast fucks. Her
womb is her wealth; her use in childbearing is his strongest tie to
her; she holds his [sic] children, actual and potential, hostage, for
her own sake. It is not rational to hate homosexuals because they
force one to experience a terror of extinction: the cold chill of being
