People—as we are always reminded by counterfeit egalitarians—
have always died too young, too soon, too isolated, too full of insupportable anguish. But only women die one by one, whether famous or obscure, rich or poor, isolated, choked to death by the
lies tangled in their throats. Only women die one by one, attempt
ing until the last minute to embody an ideal imposed upon them by
men who want to use them up. O nly women die one by one, smiling up to the last minute, smile of the siren, smile of the coy girl, smile of the madwoman. O nly women die one by one, polished
to perfection or unkempt behind locked doors too desperately
ashamed to cry out. O nly women die one by one, still believing
that if only they had been perfect— perfect wife, mother, or
whore— they would not have come to hate life so much, to find it
so strangely difficult and em pty, themselves so hopelessly confused
and despairing. Women die, mourning not the loss of their own
lives, but their own inexcusable inability to achieve perfection as
men define it for them. Women desperately try to embody a male-
defined feminine ideal because survival depends on it. The ideal,
by definition, turns a woman into a function, deprives her of any
individuality that is self-serving or self-created, not useful to the
male in his scheme of things. This monstrous female quest for
male-defined perfection, so intrinsically hostile to freedom and integrity, leads inevitably to bitterness, paralysis, or death, but like the mirage in the desert, the life-giving oasis that is not there, survival is promised in this conformity and nowhere else.
Like the chameleon, the woman must blend into her environment, never calling attention to the qualities that distinguish her, because to do so would be to attract the predator’s deadly attention. She is, in fact, hunted meat— all the male
Attempting to strike a bargain, the woman says: I come to you on
your own terms. Her hope is that his murderous attention will
focus on a female who conforms less artfully, less w illingly. In
effect, she ransoms the remains of a life— what is left over after she
has renounced willful individuality— by promising indifference to
the fate of other women. This sexual, sociological, and spiritual
adaptation, which is, in fact, the maiming of all moral capacity, is
the prim ary imperative of survival for women who live under male-
supremacist rule.
*
. . . I gradually came to see that I would have to
stay within the survivor’s own perspective. This will
perhaps bother the historian, with his distrust of
personal evidence; but radical suffering transcends
relativity, and when one survivor’s account of an
event or circumstance is repeated in exactly the same
way by dozens of other survivors, men and women
in different camps, from different nations and cultures, then one comes to trust the validity of suchreports and even to question rare departures from
the general view . 2
Terrence Des Pres,
The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical
butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical
mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and the other commonplaces of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the
mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No
matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or
eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been
whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they
were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed,
threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of
