Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

Standards o f beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body.

They prescribe her mobility, spontaneity, posture,

gait, the uses to which she can put her body. They define

precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom. And, o f

course, the relationship between physical freedom and

psychological development, intellectual possibility, and

creative potential is an umbilical one.

In our culture, not one part o f a woman’s body is

left untouched, unaltered. No feature or extremity is

spared the art, or pain, o f improvement. Hair is dyed,

lacquered, straightened, permanented; eyebrows are

plucked, penciled, dyed; eyes are lined, mascaraed,

shadowed; lashes are curled, or false —from head to

toe, every feature o f a woman's face, every section o f

her body, is subject to modification, alteration. This al­

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teration is an ongoing, repetitive process. It is vital to

the economy, the major substance of male-female role

differentiation, the most immediate physical and psychological reality of being a woman. From the age of 11 or 12 until she dies, a woman will spend a large part

of her time, money, and energy on binding, plucking,

painting, and deodorizing herself. It is commonly and

wrongly said that male transvestites through the use of

makeup and costuming caricature the women they

would become, but any real knowledge of the romantic

ethos makes clear that these men have penetrated to the

core experience of being a woman, a romanticized construct.

The technology of beauty, and the message it carries, is handed down from mother to daughter. Mother teaches daughter to apply lipstick, to shave under her

arms, to bind her breasts, to wear a girdle and high-

heeled shoes. Mother teaches daughter concomitantly

her role, her appropriate behavior, her place. Mother

teaches daughter, necessarily, the psychology which

defines womanhood: a woman must be beautiful, in

order to please the amorphous and amorous Him. What

we have called the romantic ethos operates as vividly

in 20th-century Amerika and Europe as it did in 10th-

century China.

This cultural transfer o f technology, role, and psychology virtually affects the emotive relationship between mother and daughter. It contributes substantially to the ambivalent love-hate dynamic o f that relationship.

What must the Chinese daughter/child have felt toward

the mother who bound her feet? What does any daughter/child feel toward the mother who forces her to do

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding

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painful things to her own body? T h e mother takes on