unalterable. This feature of the male-dominant model is unique to
it. Neither the separate-but-equal model nor the woman-superior
model puts women in a metaphysically defined, biologically determined relationship of prostitution to men. (Perhaps this virtue of the male-dominant model accounts for its ubiquity. ) The bargain
women must make because men are biologically dominant is
pointed to whenever a woman achieves. The bargain is searched
for—what did she sell to whom to enable her to do whatever she
did? The necessity for bargaining is used to stop rebellion. The
bargain necessitated by his greater aggression, strength, and power
is the principal reason for refuting the possibility of her claim to
independence in this model of antifeminism. He is dominant; she
must submit. Submission in the face of greater strength, greater
aggression, greater power, is unavoidable. She is simply not strong
enough to be on her own— especially not if he wants her because
she is not strong enough or aggressive enough to stop him from
taking her. So each woman has to make a deal with at least one of
the strong ones for protection; and the deal she makes, being based
on her inferiority, originating in it, acknowledges the truth and
inevitability of that inferiority. In needing to bargain because she is
too weak not to, she proves that antifeminism— the repudiation of
her freedom— is grounded in simple biological necessity, biological
common sense, biological realism.
Because the male is presumed dominant by natural right or divine w ill, he is supposed to have an exclusive authority in the realm of public power. The antifeminism predicated on natural
male dominance also maintains that men naturally dominate government, politics, economics, culture, state and m ilitary policy—
that men naturally assert their dominance by running all social and
political institutions. The token woman here and there in no w ay
interferes w ith the effectiveness of virtually all-male clubs of power
in erasing any hope of real authority or influence for women. One
woman on the Supreme Court, one woman in the Senate, a woman
prime minister, an occasional woman head of state, are not so
much role models as rebukes to economically demoralized women
who are supposed to accept the tokens as what they too could have
been if only they themselves had been different— better, smarter,
richer, prettier, not such schlemiels. Token women must go out of
their w ay not to offend the male sense of fem ininity, but by their
visibility they inevitably do so. As a result, the token women give
out the correct line on fem ininity and at the same time bear the
brunt of the critical perception that obviously they are not at home
being fucked. T he woman who is not a token is mostly condescended to by the token, a condescension that she feels not only acutely but often, since the token is always pointed out to her as
proof that her own situation does not result from an exclusionary
social system . Every all-male or nearly all-male group— profession,
institution, business, club, or power clique—is a concrete embodiment of antifeminism. By its existence it upholds and proclaims the dominance of men over women. By its existence it reinforces the
social inferiority of women to men, perpetuates the political subordination of women to men, mandates the economic dependence of women on men, and endlessly revitalizes the sexual submission of
women to men. The all-male clique of power communicates the
antifeminism of male dominance everywhere it operates, all the
time, without exception. The power of men to make decisions and
determine policy, to create culture and to control the institutions of
culture, is simultaneously held to be the logical outcome of male
dominance and proof of its existence. Every institution that is
structurally male-dominant is also ideologically male-dominant; or
its structure would change. Every group that is structurally male-
dominant functions as concrete resistance, material resistance, to
the liberation of women: it prohibits the exodus of women from the
obligations and disadvantages, not to mention the cruelties, of inferiority. Any area that is virtually all male is hostile to women, to political rights, economic parity, and sexual self-determination
for women. The verbal support of men in all-male institutions,
groups, or cliques of power for mild feminist reform has no value
