as if there were nothing human, only an anatomical use. She
gets to be dirty al over, and what is done to her gets to be
dirty al over. She is also a joke. None of the women I’ve met
in my life has been either dirty or a joke.
Feminists have good reasons for feeling tired. The backlash
against feminism has been deeply stupid. But first there is the
frontlash, the misogyny that saturates the gender system, so
that a woman is always less. The frontlash is the world the
way one knew it thirty-five years ago; there was no feminism
to stand against the enemies of women.
I often see the women’s movement referred to as one of the
most successful social change movements the world has yet
seen, and there is great truth in that. In some parts of the
Western world, fathers do not own their daughters under the
law; the fact that this has transmogrified into a commonplace
incest doesn’t change the accomplishment in rendering the
paterfamilias a nul ity in the old sense.
In most parts of the Western world, rape in marriage is now
il egal - it was not illegal thirty-five years ago.
In the United States, most women have paying jobs, even
though equal pay for equal work is a long way off; and
although it is stil true that sexual harassment makes women
migrants in the labor market, the harassment itself is now
il egal and one can sue - one has a weapon.
Middle-class women keep battery a secret and in working-
and lower-class families battery is not suf iciently stigmatized;
nevertheless, there are new initiatives against both bat ery
and the batterer, and there wil be more, including the nearly
universal acceptance of a self-defense plea for killing a
bat erer.
The slime of woman hating comes now from the bot om,
oozing its way up the social scale. There is a class beneath
working and lower class that is entirely marginalized. It’s the
sex-for-money class, the whoring class, the pornography class,
the trafficked-woman class, the woman who is invisible almost
because one can see so much of her. Each inch of nakedness is
an inch of worthlessness and lack of social protection. The
world’s economies have taken to trafficking in women; the
woman with a few shekels is bet er off, they say, than the
woman with none. I know a few formerly prostituted women,
including myself, who disagree.
The women I’ve met are very often first raped, then pimped
inside their own families while they are still children. Their
bodies have no borders. Middle-class women, including middle-
class feminists, cannot imagine such marginality. It’s as if the
