standard of what a woman is and what a woman does and what a
woman needs to be a woman (she needs to keep doing female
things, whether she wants to or not). What are the lives of all these
women worth? Is there anything in the w ay they are viewed or
valued that upholds their human dignity as individuals? T hey already matter very little. T hey are treated with cruelty or callous indifference. T hey have already been thrown aw ay. It is public
policy to throw them aw ay. What is going to happen to women
when reproduction— the only capacity that women have that men
really need (Portnoy’s piece of liver can substitute for the rest in
hard times)— is no longer the exclusive province of the class
women? W hat is going to happen to women who have only one
argument for the importance of their existence— that their reproductive capacities are worth a little something (shelter, food, solace, minimal respect)— when men can make babies?
*
And yet, there is a solitude which each and every
one o f us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profoundthan the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner
being which we call ourself, no eye nor touch o f man
or angel has ever pierced. It is more hidden than the
caves of the gnome; the sacred adytum o f the oracle;
the hidden chamber o f Eleusinian m ystery, for to it
only omniscience is permitted to enter.
Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take,
dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speech,
January 18, 1892
There is no thing named love in the world.
Women are dinks. Women are villains. They are
creatures akin to Communists and yellow-skinned
people and hippies. We march off to learn about
hand-to-hand combat. Blynton grins and teases and
hollers out his nursery rhyme: “If ya wanta live, ya
gotta be ag-ile, mo-bile, and hos-tile. ” We chant the
words: ag-ile, mo-bile, hos-tile. We make it all
rhyme.
Tim O’Brien,
There are two models that essentially describe how women are
socially controlled and sexually used: the brothel model and the
farming model.
The brothel model relates to prostitution, narrowly defined;
women collected together for the purposes of sex with men;
women whose function is explicitly nonreproductive, almost anti-
reproductive; sex animals in heat or pretending, showing themselves for sex, prancing around or posed for sex.
The farming model relates to motherhood, women as a class
planted with the male seed and harvested; women used for the fruit
they bear, like trees; women who run the gamut from prized cows
to mangy dogs, from highbred horses to sad beasts of burden.
These two poles of the female condition are only superficially
and conceptually distinct and opposite. Men say the two are poles
to begin with, distinct and opposite. That male conceit is registered and repeated until it is easier to repeat the concept by rote than to see the reality. But the concept is only accurate (descriptive) from a male point of view—that is, if one accepts the male definitions of both the acts involved and the women involved. In
the course of women’s lives, and therefore from a woman-based
