We have to make love to people who are dead, and
that’s not easy. 3
Here is the ever popular notion that women, extending our role as sex object, can humanize an atrophied world. T he notion is based on a false premise. Just as
the pill was supposed to liberate women by liberating
us sexually, i. e., we could fuck as freely as men, fucking
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Woman Hating
is supposed to liberate women and men too. But the pill
served to reinforce our essential bondage —it made us
more accessible, more open to exploitation. It did not
change our basic condition because it did nothing to
challenge the sexist structure of society, not to mention
conventional sexual relationships and couplings. Neither
does promiscuity per se. Greer’s alliance with the sexual
revolution is, sadly but implicitly, an alliance with male
chauvinism because it does not speak to the basic condition of women which remains the same if we fuck one man a week, or twenty.
There is similar misunderstanding in this statement:
Well, listen, this is one o f the things a woman has
to understand, and I get a bit impatient sometimes with
women who can’t see it. A woman, after all, in this
country is a commodity. She’s a status symbol, and the
prettier she is the more expensive, the more difficult
to attain. Anyone can have a fat old lady. But young
girls with clear eyes are not for the 40-year-old man
who’s been working as a packer or a storeman all his
life. So that when he sees her he snarls, mostly I think,
because she’s not available to him. She’s another taunt,
and yet another index o f how the American dream is
not his to have. He never had a girl like that and he
never will.
Now, I think that the most sensible way for us to
see the crime of rape is an act o f aggression against
this property symbol. . . (but I’m not sure about
this at all —I mean, I think it’s also aggression against
the mother who fucks up so many people’s lives). And
I must think that as a woman, who has not done a
revolution, have not put myself on the barricade on
this question, I owe it to my poor brothers not to get
uptight. Because I am that, I am a woman they could
Woman as Victim:
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never hope to ball, and in the back o f my mind I reject
them too. 4
Here again, the alliance is with male chauvinism, and it
is incomprehensible. Mothers fuck up people’s lives in
