cannot combat antifeminism because it has incorporated it. Antifeminism proposes two standards for rights and responsibilities: two standards determined strictly by and applied strictly to sex.
Feminism as the liberation movement of women proposes one absolute standard of human dignity, indivisible by sex. In this sense, feminism does propose—as antifeminists accuse—that men and
women be treated the same. Feminism is a radical stance against
double standards in rights and responsibilities, and feminism is a
revolutionary advocacy of a single standard of human freedom.
To achieve a single standard of human freedom and one absolute
standard of human dignity, the sex-class system has to be dismem
bered. T he reason is pragmatic, not philosophical: nothing less w ill
work. However much everyone wants to do less, less w ill not free
women. Liberal men and women ask, W hy can’t we just be ourselves, all human beings, begin now and not dwell in past injustices, wouldn’t that subvert the sex-class system , change it from the inside out? T he answer is no. The sex-class system has a structure; it has deep roots in religion and culture; it is fundamental to the economy; sexuality is its creature; to be “just human beings” in
it, women have to hide what happens to them as women because
they are women— happenings like forced sex and forced reproduction, happenings that continue as long as the sex-class system operates. T he liberation of women requires facing the real condition of women in order to change it. “W e’re all just people” is a stance that
prohibits recognition of the systematic cruelties visited on women
because of sex oppression.
Feminism as a liberation movement, then, demands a revolutionary single standard of what humans have a right to, and also demands that the current sexual bifurcation of rights never be let out of sight. Antifeminism does the opposite: it insists that there is a
double standard of what humans have a right to— a male standard
and a female standard; and it insists at the same time that we are all
just human beings, right now, as things stand, within this sex-class
system, so that no special attention should be paid to social phenomena on account of sex. W ith respect to rape, for instance, the feminist starts out with a single standard of freedom and dignity:
everyone, women as well as men, should have a right to the integrity of their own body. Feminists then focus on and analyze the sex-class reality of rape: men rape, women are raped; even in those
statistically rare cases where boys or men are raped, men are the
rapists. Antifeminists start out with a double standard: men conquer, possess, dominate, men take women; women are conquered, possessed, dominated, and taken. Antifeminists then insist that
rape is a crime like any other, like mugging or homicide or bur
glary: they deny its sex-specific, sex-class nature and the political
meaning undeniably implicit in the sexual construction of the
crime. Feminists are accused of denying the common humanity of
men and women because feminists refuse to fudge on the sex issue
of who does what to whom, how often, and why. Antifeminists
refuse to acknowledge that the sex-class system repudiates the
humanity of women by keeping women systematically subject to
exploitation and violence as a condition of sex. In analyzing the
sex-class system, feminists are accused of inventing or perpetuating
it. Calling attention to it, we are told, insults women by suggesting
that they are victims (stupid enough to allow themselves to be victimized). Feminists are accused of being the agents of degradation by postulating that such degradation exists. This is a little like considering abolitionists responsible for slavery, but all is fair when love is war. In ignoring the political significance of the sex-class
system except to defend it when it is under attack, antifeminists
suggest that “we’re all in this together, ” all us human beings, dif-
ferent-but-together, a formulation that depends on lack of clarity
for its persuasiveness. Indisputably, we’re all in rape together,
some of us to great disadvantage. Feminism especially requires a
rigorous analysis of sex class, one that is ongoing, stubborn, persistent, unsentimental, disciplined, not placated by fatuous invocations of a common humanity that in fact the sex-class system itself suppresses. The sex-class system cannot be undone when those
