Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

in the realization o f a phenomenon so ancient that it

would seem to extend almost to the origins o f the religious impulse in people.

We now know most o f what can be known about

the witches: who they were, what they believed, what

they did, the Church's vision o f them. We have seen the

historical dimensions o f a myth o f feminine evil which

resulted in the slaughter o f 9 million persons, nearly

all women, over 300 years. T he actual evidence o f that

slaughter, the remembrance o f it, has been suppressed

for centuries so that the myth o f woman as the Original

Criminal, the gaping, insatiable womb, could endure.

Annihilated with the 9 million was a whole culture,

woman-centered, nature-centered —all o f their knowledge is gone, all o f their knowing is destroyed. Historians (white, male, and utterly without credibility for women, Indians, Blacks, and other oppressed peoples as they begin to search the ashes o f their own pasts) found the massacre o f the witches too unimportant to

include in the chronicles o f those centuries except as a

footnote, too unimportant to be seen as the substance

o f those centuries —they did not recognize the centuries o f gynocide, they did not register the anguish o f those deaths.

Our study o f pornography, our living o f life, tells

us that the myth o f feminine evil lived out so resolutely

by the Christians o f the Dark Ages, is alive and well,

here and now. Our study o f pornography, our living

o f life, tells us that though the witches are dead, burned

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Woman Hating

alive at the stake, the belief in female evil is not, the

hatred of female carnality is not. The Church has not

changed its premises; the culture has not refuted those

premises. It is left to us, the inheritors of that myth,

to destroy it and the institutions based on it.

Part Four

ANDROGYNY

When the sexual energy of the people is

liberated they will break the chains.

The struggle to break the form is

paramount. Because we are otherwise contained in forms that deny us the possibility

of realizing a form (a technique) to escape

the fire in which we are being consumed.

The journey to love is not romantic.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

We want to destroy sexism, that is, polar role definitions o f male and female, man and woman. We want to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family; in

its most hideous form, the nation-state. We want to

destroy the structure o f culture as we know it, its art,