is fucked too early, but once fucked she has fulfilled a preordained
function as a woman and therefore is a woman and therefore can
legitim ately be fucked.
With respect to pregnancy, if a woman can be forced to bear a
child conceived by force in marriage, there is no logic in differentiating pregnancy as a result of rape or incestuous rape. Force is the norm; pregnancy is the result; the woman has no claim to a respected identity not predicated on forced intercourse— that is, at best her dignity inheres in being a wife, subject to forced intercourse and therefore to forced pregnancy; w hy would any woman’s body be entitled to more respect than the married woman’s? Rape,
rarely credited as such by men unless the display of force has been
brutal almost beyond imagining, is in fact an exaggerated expression of a fully accepted sexual relation between men and women; and incestuous rape adds a new element of exaggeration, but the
essential sexual relation— the relation of force to female— remains
the same. Therefore, men—especially men responsible for maintaining the right and role of sexual force in marriage (lawmakers and theologians)— cannot consider pregnancy resulting from rape
or incestuous rape as
is to be fucked— and if she is pregnant, then she was fucked, no
matter what the circumstance or the means. Being fucked did not
violate her integrity as a woman because being fucked
because rape (force) in marriage is supported by the state. The
willingness to consider rape or incestuous rape exceptions at all
comes from the male recognition that a man might not want to
accept the offspring of another man’s rape as his own; a father may
not want to be both father and grandfather to the daughter of his
daughter. These exceptions, to the extent that they are or will be
honored in legislation forbidding abortion, exist to protect men.
Henry Hyde, author of the Hyde Amendment forbidding Medicaid money to poor women for abortions and opponent of all abortion under all circumstances without exception for rape, was asked by a television interviewer if he would insist that his daughter
carry a pregnancy to term if she were pregnant as the result of
rape. Yes, he answered solemnly. But the question he should have
been asked was this one: suppose his wife were pregnant as the
result of rape? This would impinge not on his sentimentality, but
on his day-to-day right of sexual possession; he would have to live
with the rape and with the carnal reality of the rape and with the
pregnancy resulting from the rape and with the offspring or the
damaged woman who would have to bear it and then give it up.
Regardless of his answer to the hypothetical question, only the
male sense of what is at stake for him in actually having to accept a
pregnancy caused by rape or incestuous rape in his own life as a
husband to the woman or girl involved could make the rape or the
woman raped real. Abortion can protect men, and can be tolerated
when it demonstrably does. In terms of the woman used, herself
alone, she is her function; she has been used in accordance with her
function; there is no reason to let her off the hook just because she
was forced by a man not her husband.
*
Norman Mailer remarked during the sixties that the problem with
the sexual revolution was that it had gotten into the hands of the
wrong people. He was right. It was in the hands of men.
The pop idea was that fucking was good, so good that the more
there was of it, the better. The pop idea was that people should
fuck whom they wanted: translated for the girls, this meant that
girls should want to be fucked— as close to all the time as was
humanly possible. For women, alas, all the time is humanly possible with enough changes of partners. Men envision frequency with reference to their own patterns of erection and ejaculation. Women
got fucked a lot more than men fucked.
Sexual-revolution philosophy predates the sixties. It shows up in
Left ideologies and movements with regularity— in most countries,
in many different periods, manifest in various leftist “tendencies. ”
