Right-wing Women

useless, unnecessary, expendable. But passions are distinguished

by their illogic: one can describe them and find an interior logic in

them up to a point—then there is a sensational leap into hate, dazzling, crazed, obsessional. Homophobia, like anti-Semitism, is not an idea; it is a passion. For women, hatred of homosexuals—

despised because they are associated with women—is more than

self-defeating; it is almost breathtakingly suicidal, encouraging as it

does the continuing hatred of anything or anyone associated with

women. But the perception that having children is the only edge

women have on survival at the hands of men is right; it is an acute

perception, grounded in an accurate reading of what women are for

and how women are used by men in this sexual system. Without

reproduction, women as a class have nothing. In sorrow or not,

bearing babies is what women can do that men need—really need,

no handjob can substitute here; and homosexuality makes women

afraid, irrationally, passionately afraid, of extinction: of being unnecessary as a class, as women, to men who destroy whatever they do not need and whose impulses toward women are murderous

anyway.

5

The Coming Gynocide

Rich as you are

Death will finish

you: afterwards no

one will remember

or want you;. . .

Sappho

In A Room o f One's O w n, first read as a paper in 1928, the prescient

Virginia Woolf called the attention of the women in her audience

to a statement by a popular British journalist of the time who

warned “that when children cease to be altogether desirable,

women cease to be altogether necessary. ” 1 The woman who is deviant because she has no children, as Woolf was even in her avant-garde set, is often aware of how tenuous her existence is: it is a

courtesy extended to her— letting her go on—despite the fact that

she is not earning her womanly keep in the womanly w ay. She

knows how little the world at large needs her or values her for

anything else she does even when she is exceptional; and if she

understands how systematic and relentless the valuation of her

kind is, she also knows that at the heart of the male system there is

a profound contempt for anything in women that is individual, that

is independent of the class definition or function, that cannot finally be perceived and justified as incidental to motherhood.

Had anyone thought seriously about how women “cease to be

altogether necessary, ” they might have thought in terms of population control: there are too many people; governments decide to feed all the people, which provides a certain incentive for finding ways

to see that there are less people; this is presented to the people as a

humanistic program to increase the quality of life for a smaller, less

burdensome, less troubled population; the women who were giving