only omniscience is permitted to enter.
Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take,
dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speech,
January 18, 1892
There is no thing named love in the world.
Women are dinks. Women are villains. They are
creatures akin to Communists and yellow-skinned
people and hippies. We march off to learn about
hand-to-hand combat. Blynton grins and teases and
hollers out his nursery rhyme: “If ya wanta live, ya
gotta be ag-ile, mo-bile, and hos-tile. ” We chant the
words: ag-ile, mo-bile, hos-tile. We make it all
rhyme.
Tim O’Brien,
There are two models that essentially describe how women are
socially controlled and sexually used: the brothel model and the
farming model.
The brothel model relates to prostitution, narrowly defined;
women collected together for the purposes of sex with men;
women whose function is explicitly nonreproductive, almost anti-
reproductive; sex animals in heat or pretending, showing themselves for sex, prancing around or posed for sex.
The farming model relates to motherhood, women as a class
planted with the male seed and harvested; women used for the fruit
they bear, like trees; women who run the gamut from prized cows
to mangy dogs, from highbred horses to sad beasts of burden.
These two poles of the female condition are only superficially
and conceptually distinct and opposite. Men say the two are poles
to begin with, distinct and opposite. That male conceit is registered and repeated until it is easier to repeat the concept by rote than to see the reality. But the concept is only accurate (descriptive) from a male point of view—that is, if one accepts the male definitions of both the acts involved and the women involved. In
the course of women’s lives, and therefore from a woman-based
perspective, the two conditions overlap and intersect, each reinforcing the efficacy of the other. Any woman can be both a prostitute and a mother, a prostitute and a wife (a potential mother), or one then the other in either order; and any woman can be subject
to the imperatives of both the brothel and the farming models of
female usage. On a grand scale, more women become mothers,
fewer prostitutes.
In general, the euphemisms of religion and romantic love keep
women from ever recognizing the farming model as having to do
directly and personally with them. Modern women do not think of
themselves as cows, nor as land that the man seeds; but maleheaded marriage incorporates both these vivid traditions of female definition; and the laws have been built on these same images and
ideas of what women are for; and the real history of women has
had as its center the actual use of women as cows and as land. The
w ay women are treated, valued, and used has remarkably little in
common with how women perceive themselves. The legend says
