protect not fertilized eggs but motherhood and their own worth as
women in God’s eyes as well as man’s. They will learn the crudest
lesson of history: “Every decent End consumes itself. You kill
yourself trying to reach it, and by the time you get there it’s been
turned inside out. ” 14 The words were written by Soviet dissident
Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), but every passionate political activist of conscience—whatever the “decent End”—has had occasion to say them, in trouble and in grief. What one means to do goes
wrong, it becomes what one abhors. Right to Life women will see
it too late: they will stay mesmerized by the small tributes men pay
to the idea—not the reality—of women as mothers. The power the
Right to Life women are fighting so hard to put into the hands of
the state will eventually and inevitably be used (1) to redefine when
life begins and what life is so that the male becomes its sole creator
and (2) to determine and enforce which women reproduce, when,
and how. The women not needed will have no claim to civil dignity or civil protection. The reason for female submission finally will be very simple and overwhelmingly clear: for women submission will be a matter of life or death, with the right of appeal to the sacredness of women as mothers no longer in the vocabulary of
male supremacy.
When women cease to be altogether necessary, politically dissident women become altogether unnecessary. Once women are biologically expendable on a grand scale, political women need no longer be tolerated on any scale. Politically dissident women are
considered unnecessary now: this is the mood toward feminists and
other women who rebel; someday it will be policy, not a mood.
The criteria for politically dissident women—troublemakers—will
be extended to include any women not domestics, sex prostitutes,
or reproductive prostitutes. The religiously orthodox women will
find themselves characterized as politically dissident women one
day too: there they will be, advocating and upholding old laws,
customs, and ideas that are no longer in the best interests of men.
They will be demanding more than men want them to have and
there will be no concessions from men: because men will be able to
control reproduction without the mass complicity of women. Reduced to its simplest elements, the old misogyny was expressed by the ancient Greek Hipponax of Ephesus: “The two days in a
woman’s life a man can best enjoy are when he marries her and
when he carries her dead body to the grave. ” 15 In the misogyny of
the future—in the coming gynocide—he will have one day he can
best enjoy: “when he carries her dead body to the grave. ” We come
after, as George Steiner wrote; and we are women. We know what
men can do.
6
Antifeminism
some men
would rather see us dead than imagine
what we think of them/
if we measure our silence by our pain
how could the words
any word
ever catch up
what is it we could call equal
Ntozake Shange, “Slow Drag, ” from
Feminism is a much-hated political philosophy. T his is true all
along the male-defined, recognizable political spectrum from far
Right to far Left. Feminism is hated because women are hated.
Antifeminism is a direct expression of m isogyny; it is the political
defense of woman hating. This is because feminism is the liberation movement of women. Antifeminism, in any of its political colorations, holds that the social and sexual condition of women essentially (one w ay or another) embodies the nature of women,
that the w ay women are treated in sex and in society is congruent
with what women are, that the fundamental relationship between
men and women— in sex, in reproduction, in social hierarchy— is
both necessary and inevitable. Antifeminism defends the conviction that the male abuse of women, especially in sex, has an im
plicit logic, one that no program of social justice can or should
eliminate; that because the male use of women originates in the
distinct and opposite natures of each which converge in what is
called “sex, ” women are not abused when used as women—but
merely used for what they are by men as men. It is admitted that
there are excesses of male sadism—committed by deranged individuals, for instance—but in general the massive degradation of women is not seen to violate the nature of women as such. For
