Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

When we feel, we will feel the emergency: when we feel the emergency, we

will act: when we act, we will change the

world.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

T he rapes, tortures, and violations o f O, Claire, Anne,

Suck's Helen, et al., are fiction, documenting the twisted

landscape o f male wish-fulfillment. Here we have her-

story, the underbelly o f history, two acts o f gynocide

committed against women by men, their scope and substance largely ignored. One is not surprised to find that they document that same twisted landscape.

I isolate in particular Chinese footbinding and the

persecution o f the witches because they are crimes

which equal in sheer horror and sadism the extermination o f Native Americans and Hitler’s massacre o f the Jews. Those two horrendous slaughters have found a

place, however tenuous, in the “conscience” o f “man. ”

Acts o f genocide against women have barely been noticed, and they have never evoked rage, or horror, or sorrow. That sexist hatred equals racist hatred in its

intensity, irrationality, and contempt for the sanctity

o f human life these two examples clearly demonstrate.

That women have not been exterminated, and will not

be (at least until the technology o f creating life in the

laboratory is perfected) can be attributed to our presumed ability to bear children and, more importantly 93

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Woman Hating

no doubt, to the relative truth that men prefer to fuck

cunts who are nominally alive. I except here necrophili-

acs, those pure and unsullied princes, whose story begins where ours ends.

In addition, in any war, in any violence between

tribes or nations, a specific war crime is perpetrated

against women —that of rape. Every woman raped

during a political nation-state war is the victim of a

much larger war, planetary in its dimensions —the war,

more declared than we can bear to know, that men wage

against women. That war had its most gruesome, grotesque expression when Chinese men bound the feet of Chinese women and when British, Welsh, Irish,

Scottish, German, Dutch, French, Swiss, Italian, Spanish,

and Amerikan men had women burned at the stake in

the name of God the Father and His only Son.

F O O T B I N D I N G E V E N T

Instructions Before Reading Chapter

1. Find a piece o f cloth 10 feet long and 2 inches wide

2. Find a pair o f children’s shoes

3. Bend all toes except the big one under and into the

sole o f the foot. W rap the cloth around these toes