Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

the role o f enforcer: she uses seduction, command, all

manner o f force to coerce the daughter to conform to

the demands o f the culture. It is because this role becomes her dominant role in the mother- daughter relationship that tensions and difficulties between mothers and daughters are so often unresolvable. T h e daughter

who rejects the cultural norms enforced by the mother

is forced to a basic rejection o f her own mother, a recognition o f the hatred and resentment she felt toward that mother, an alienation from mother and society

so extreme that her own womanhood is denied by both.

T h e daughter who internalizes those values and endorses those same processes is bound to repeat the teaching she was taught —her anger and resentment remain subterranean, channeled against her own female offspring as well as her mother.

Pain is an essential part o f the grooming process,

and that is not accidental. Plucking the eyebrows,

shaving under the arms, wearing a girdle, learning to

walk in high-heeled shoes, having one’s nose fixed,

straightening or curling one’s hair —these things hurt.

The pain, o f course, teaches an important lesson: no

price is too great, no process too repulsive, no operation

too painful for the woman who would be beautiful.

The tolerance of pain and the romanticization of that tolerance begins here, in preadolescence, in socialization, and serves to prepare women for lives o f childbearing, self-abnegation, and husband-pleasing. The adolescent

experience o f the “pain o f being a woman” casts the

feminine psyche into a masochistic mold and forces

the adolescent to conform to a self-image which bases

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itself on mutilation of the body, pain happily suffered,

and restricted physical mobility. It creates the masochistic personalities generally found in adult women: subservient, materialistic (since all value is placed on the

body and its ornamentation), intellectually restricted,

creatively impoverished. It forces women to be a sex of

lesser accomplishment, weaker, as underdeveloped as

any backward nation. Indeed, the effects o f that prescribed relationship between women and their bodies are so extreme, so deep, so extensive, that scarcely any

area of human possibility is left untouched by it.

Men, of course, like a woman who “takes care of

herself. ” The male response to the woman who is made-

up and bound is a learned fetish, societal in its dimensions. One need only refer to the male idealization of the bound foot and say that the same dynamic is operating here. Romance based on role differentiation, superiority based on a culturally determined and rigidly enforced inferiority, shame and guilt and fear of women and sex itself: all necessitate the perpetuation of these

oppressive grooming imperatives.

The meaning of this analysis of the romantic ethos

surely is clear. A first step in the process of liberation

(women from their oppression, men from the unfreedom of their fetishism) is the radical redefining of the relationship between women and their bodies. The

body must be freed, liberated, quite literally: from paint

and girdles and all varieties of crap. Women must stop

mutilating their bodies and start living in them. Perhaps the notion of beauty which will then organically emerge will be truly democratic and demonstrate a

respect for human life in its infinite, and most honorable, variety.