Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

a woman is to be passive, victimized, destroyed, or

asleep. It tells us that happiness is for the woman who

is good —inert, passive, victim ized—and that a good

woman is a happy woman. It tells us that the happy ending is when we are ended, when we live without our lives or not at all.

Part Two

THE PORNOGRAPHY

Among my brethren are many who dream

with wet pleasure of the eight hundred

pains and humiliations, but I am the other

kind: I am a slave who dreams of escape

after escape, I dream only of escaping,

ascent, of a thousand possible ways to

make a hole in the wall, of melting the

bars, escape escape, of burning the whole

prison down if necessary.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

Bookshop shelves are lined with pornography. It is a

staple o f the market place, and where it is illegal it

flourishes and prices soar. From The Beautiful Flagellants of New York to Twelve Inches around the World, cheap-editioned, overpriced renditions o f fucking, sucking,

whipping, footlicking, gangbanging, etc., in all o f their

manifold varieties are available — whether in the supermarket or on the black market. Most literary pornography is easily describable: repetitious to the point o f inducing catatonia, ill-conceived, simple- minded, brutal, and very ugly. Why, then, do we spend our money on it? Why, then, is it erotically stimulating for masses

o f men and women?

Literary pornography is the cultural scenario o f

male/female. It is the collective scenario o f master/

slave. It contains cultural truth: men and women, grown

now out o f the fairy-tale landscape into the castles o f

erotic desire; woman, her carnality adult and explicit,

her role as victim adult and explicit, her guilt adult

and explicit, her punishment lived out on her flesh, her

end annihilation —death or complete submission.

Pornography, like fairy tale, tells us who we are. It

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Woman Hating

is the structure of male and female mind, the content

o f our shared erotic identity, the map of each inch and

mile o f our oppression and despair. Here we move beyond childhood terror. Here the fear is clammy and real, and rightly so. Here we are compelled to ask the

real questions: why are we defined in these ways, and

how can we bear it?