that having children does not get women respect or a place is almost beside the point: poor women don’t get respect and live in dung heaps; black women don’t get respect and are jailed in decimated ghettos; just plain pregnant women don’t get respect and the place they have is a dangerous one— pregnancy is now considered
a
25 percent of families in which battery occurs, it is a pregnant
woman who has been battered. In fact, having children may mean
both increased violence and increased dependence; it may significantly worsen the economic circumstances of a woman or a fam ily; it may hurt a woman’s health or jeopardize her in a host of other
ways; but having children is the one social contribution credited to
women— it is the bedrock of women’s social worth. Despite all the
happy smiling public mommies, the private mommies have grim
private recognitions. One perception is particularly chilling: without the children, I am not worth much. The recognition is actually more dramatic than that, much more chilling: without the children, I am not. Right-wing Judaism and right-wing Christianity both guarantee that women will continue to have a place outside
history but inside the home: through childbearing. Without that,
women know they have nothing. Homosexuality for women means
having nothing; it means extinction. Well, who’s going to have the
babies? men ask when faced with women surgeons and politicians— as if the question had an intrinsic logic; or as if ending war were not logically a part of having “enough” people. “All this talk,
for and against and about babies, ” wrote Charlotte Perkins G ilman, “is by men. One would think the men bore the babies, nursed the babies, reared the babies.. . . The women bear and
rear the children. The men kill them. Then they say: ‘We are run
ning short of children—make some more. ’” 14 The extinction
women fear is not this extinction men conjure up: who will make
the babies so that we can fight our wars? It is the extinction of
women: women’s function and with it women’s worth. Men have
one reason for keeping women alive: to bear babies. The sex of
domination leads to death: it is the killing of body and w ill—conquest, possession, annihilation; sex, violence, death—that is pure sex; and it is the slow annihilation of the woman’s will that is eros,
and the slow annihilation of her body that is eros; her violation is
sex, whether it ends in her aesthetic disappearance into oblivion or
her body bludgeoned in a newspaper photograph or the living husk
used and discarded as sexual garbage. Annihilation is sexy, and sex
tends toward it; women are the preferred victims of record. Only
having children moderates men’s sexual usage of women: use them
up and throw them away, fuck them to death, killing them softly.
If women are not needed to run the country or write the books or
make the music or to farm or engineer or dig coal or fix plumbing
or cure the sick or plav basketball, what are women needed for? If
the absence of women from all these areas, from all areas, is not
perceived as loss, emptiness, poverty, what are women for? Right-
wing women have faced the answer. Women are for fucking and
having children. Fucking gets you dead, unless you have children
too. Homosexuality—its rise in public visibility, attempts to socially legitimize or protect it, a sense that it is attractive and on the move and winning not only acceptance but practitioners—makes
women expendable: the one thing women can do and be valued for
will no longer be valued, cannot be counted on to be that bedrock
of women’s worth. This is true of both lesbianism and male homosexuality, in that both negate women’s reproductive value to men; but male homosexuality is especially terrifying because it suggests
a world without women altogether—a world in which women are
extinct. “[I]n sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, ” God cursed
Adam’s woman (Genesis 3: 16)— she is referred to as “the woman”
until she and Adam are expelled from Eden and Adam names her
Eve “because she was the mother of all living” (Genesis 3: 20). On
expulsion from Eden man knew sex leading to death; and woman
knew childbearing in sorrow and pain, on which her well-being,
such as it is, still depends. The sorrow was apparently avoided
