Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

message is strangely familiar.

Pauline Reage, the major promoter of The Image as

a piece of metaphysical veracity, sees the function,

or very existence, of the man-master, as the glorification of the woman-slave. Her thesis is that to be a slave is to have power:

. . . the all powerful slave, dragging herself along the

ground at her master’s heels, is now really the god.

The man is only her priest, living in fear and trembling

of her displeasure. His sole function is to perform the

various ceremonies that center around the sacred object. 5

With the logic indigenous to our dual-role culture, the

slave is here transmuted into the source of power. What

price power, one asks in despair. This is truly the source

of the male notion of female power—since she is at the center

of his obsession, she is powerful; no matter that the form

her power takes is that she “drag herself along the

ground at her master’s heels. ”

The man, Reage instructs us, has the illusion of

power because he wields the whip. That illusion marks

for Reage the distance between carnal knowledge and

what is, more profoundly, true:

Yes, men are foolish to expect us to revere them when,

in the end, they amount to almost nothing. Woman,

like man himself, can only worship at the shrine o f

Woman as Victim: The Image

69

that abused body, now loved and now reviled, subjected to every humiliation, but which is, after all, her own. The man, in this particular affair, stays in one

piece: he is the true worshiper, aspiring in vain to

become one with his god.

The woman, on the contrary, although just as much

of a true worshiper and possessed of that same anxious

regard (for herself) is also the divine object, violated,

endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn, whose only joy,

achieved through a subtle interplay of images, lies in

contemplation of herself. 6

Having noted in the last chapter Reage’s extraordinary

facility with the double-double think, which she uses

here with her usual skill, I must take exception to her

conclusions. It is surprising that the worship o f the

divine object, the woman as victim and executioner,

should involve any external mediation, especially that

o f a male priest. Surely if woman is so willing to be the

giver and the offering, if as “the divine object, violated,

endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn” her “only joy. . .

lies in contemplation o f herself, ” a man is extraneous.

Surely, with such divine endowments and attendant

satisfactions, she need not be coaxed or seduced into