Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

place the nuclear family above the human family. T h e

destruction o f the incest taboo is essential to the development o f cooperative human community based on the free-flow o f natural androgynous eroticism.

Th e Family

For if we grant that the sexual drive is at

birth diffuse and undifferentiated from the

total personality (Freud’s “ polymorphous

perversity”) and. . . becomes differentiated only in response to the incest taboo;

and that. . . the incest taboo is now necessary only in order to preserve the family;

then if we did away with the family we

would in effect be doing away with the

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Woman Hating

repressions that mold sexuality into specific formations.

Shulamith Firestone,

The Dialectic o f Sex

The incest taboo can be destroyed only by destroying the nuclear family as the primary institution of the culture. The nuclear family is the school of values in a

sexist, sexually repressed society. One learns what one

must know: the roles, rituals, and behaviors appropriate

to male-female polarity and the internalized mechanisms of sexual repression. The alternative to the nuclear family at the moment is the extended family, or tribe. The growth of tribe is part of the process of

destroying particularized roles and fixed erotic identity.

As people develop fluid androgynous identity, they

will also develop the forms of community appropriate

to it. We cannot really imagine what those forms will

be.

Children

The special tie women have with children

is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature o f this bond is no

more than shared oppression. And that

moreover this oppression is intertwined

and mutually reinforcing in such complex

ways that we will be unable to speak of

the liberation o f women without also discussing the liberation o f children.

Shulamith Firestone,

The Dialectic o f Sex

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

191

T w o developments are occurring simultaneously:

women are rejecting the female role, and life is being

created in the laboratory. Unless the structure is totally

transformed, we can expect that when women no longer

function as biological breeders we will be expendable.

As men learn more and more to control reproduction,

as cloning becomes a reality, and as the technology o f