Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The part women were assigned to play in Hitler’s Germany was to be one strictly confined to utter dedication to motherhood and the family,8 and yet (here there is perhaps less inherent contradiction than one might suppose) women were to make up the factory population which serviced and produced the German war machine, at least at the outset, and until their numbers were augmented with slave labor from Eastern Europe. By 1935 the National Labor Service Law of July 26 obliged members of both sexes to participate in state labor, which by 1940, few women could escape. For all the thundering propaganda about marriage, holy motherhood and home, the number of employed women, even working mothers, increased under Nazi rule from 1933 onward.9 This in itself is hardly surprising, for the population of women employees all over the world increased during this period, and one would expect such an increase following upon the opening of higher education to women. But in Nazi Germany, a government decree10 stipulated that women be held to a quota of one in ten university students; women constituted only one third of high school students. This is a far lower ratio than one would have expected in view of the rapid strides of feminism in Germany; it is far lower than in England and America. What does make Germany unique among Western states at this period was its reversal of the feminist thrust into the professions and the higher economic and social positions. The actual purpose of Nazi ideology was not, as stated, to return women to the home, but to “take women out of professions and put them into low-paid occupations.”11 Speaking at a meeting of the Nazi medical panel in December 1934, Dr. Wagner, the appointed leader of the medical profession, cried out before a mixed audience, “We will strangle higher education for women.”12 The dissenting feminist voices still heard within the new order were silenced one by one, Dr. Thimm, Anna Pappritz, and Sophie Rogge-Borner. When the new regime had taken over, German women were forbidden to sit as judges; in 1936 they were forbidden to hold office in the courts. There were thirty women in the Reichstag when the Nazis came to power; they were apparently not “the right kind,” for by 1938 there were none. One gathers some insight into Nazi emotions below the chivalrous eulogies of motherhood in the jeer which a National Socialist member called out to a Social Democrat who regretted the death of her son in World War I: “For that you she-goats were made.”13

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  We have women working in the foundries, stripped to the waist, if you please, because of the heat. Yet the Senator says nothing about these women losing their charm…Of course you know the reason they are employed in foundries is that they are cheaper and work longer hours than men. Women in the laundries, for instance, stand for thirteen or fourteen hours in the terrible steam and heat with their hands in hot starch. Surely these women won’t lose any more of their beauty and charm by putting a ballot in a ballot box once a year than they are likely to lose standing in foundries or laundries all year round. There is no harder contest than the contest for bread, let me tell you that.8 Wanda Neff’s scholarly and informative study of Victorian working women has documented the effects of benign masculine protection in England. As in America women generally suffered from longer hours, duller tasks, more noxious working conditions, and lower wages than men in every trade. Parliamentary Blue Books, Kay-Shuttleworth’s reports, and Engels’ Conditions of the Working Class in England all present appalling descriptions of the outrages English women endured in the industrial revolution while the doctrine of manly guardianship was gravely proclaimed. Neff prints the personal testimony of a “drawer” in the coal mines of Little-Bolton–the reader’s attention is directed toward the position this woman occupies in relation to her connubial master as well as to the abuses perpetrated on her by her employers:9 I have a belt around my waist and a chain passing between my legs, and I go on my hands and feet. The road is very steep, and we have to hold by a rope, and when there is no rope, by anything we can catch hold of…The pit is very wet where I work, and the water comes over our clogs always, and I have seen it up to my thighs: it rains in at the roof terribly: my clothes are wet through almost all day long. I never was ill in my life but when I was lying-in. My cousin looks after my children in the daytime. I am very tired when I get home at night; I fall asleep sometimes before I get washed. I am not so strong as I was, and cannot stand my work so well as I used to do. I have drawn till I have had the skin off me; the belt and chain is worse when we are in the family way. My feller [husband] has beaten me many a time for not being ready. I were not used to it at first, and he had little patience. I have known many a man beat his drawer.10

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  At the Congress of Kiev in 1932 abortion was decried for innumerable reasons, all of which came down to authoritarian state interest in forcing women to bear children, explained as population policy (the birth rate had boomed after the revolution and now a slight decline was interpreted as catastrophic). There was much cant about “preserving the race,” “humanity dying out,” “morality collapsing,” and so forth. The other prevailing rationale was based on an equally authoritarian distaste over the fact women now enjoyed the control of their bodies; functionaries fussed that women were no longer ashamed of abortion and now “considered it their legal right.”40 Dr. Koroliov urged his colleagues that “criminal abortion is a sign of immorality which finds support in the legalization of abortion…It prevents motherhood…Its intention is not that of helping the mother or society; it has nothing to do with the protection of maternal health.”41 The effect here is to force motherhood on the unwilling as a social obligation, to deny that sexuality may be removed from procreation, and to create a negative attitude toward sexuality itself under the guise of pious concern over women and babies. The last was hardly necessary, so great was the shame and distaste for sexuality in Soviet women, a legacy from prerevolutionary attitudes, that the same congress could affirm that 60–70 per cent of women were incapable of experiencing sexual pleasure. Despite legalization it had taken ten years to stamp out the underground trade in abortions and the excessive or abusive resort to abortion was the result of so negative an attitude toward sexuality that women felt guilty in using contraception.42 Despite strong public objection, Stalin’s Second Five Year Plan in 1936 outlawed abortion in first pregnancies. This is often said to be the last occasion on which Stalin consulted public opinion. In 1944 all legal abortion was abolished, with two-year prison terms for persons who aided a woman in securing it. Acute observers perceived that the rationalization for the repeal of the right to legal abortion as a desire to protect the health of the mother was a hypocrisy which “obviously camouflaged”43 the desire for a rise in the birth rate as the result of war preparations. “We have need of people” Soltz proclaimed, oblivious to the number of homeless children, the housing shortage and harried involuntary mothers. Just as in Nazi Germany, the mood had changed to one which dictated large population growth in an increasingly militarized society.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Having attacked sexual reform and put their opposition on the defensive with the charge of penis envy and an ingenious interpretation of history, Lundberg and Farnham bring on their more insidious “soft line.” This is a glorification of “femininity,” the family, female submission, and above all, motherhood. To do so requires nothing more elaborate than the forensic equipment which served Ruskin, but at times there is a curious tone of “female chauvinism” about many of their pronouncements. At its positive moments, however The Lost Sex only rewrites a “Queen’s Gardens” doctrine of separate spheres. One grows appalled at how monotonous polemic in this area can be. Employing a tactic that was to become a reactionary classic, the authors insist that the sexual revolution must have been error for so many women are still imperfectly happy; witness how they suffer from “conflicts,” from “problems.” Under the guise of solicitude, such comforters end by punishing the sufferer of these vague and convenient symptoms still further. If woman is “maladjusted” the fault lies in herself rather than in the social situation to which she is exhorted to adjust by assuming her unchangeable constitutional passivity.170 Accusation poses as diagnosis, prescription as description. Much of the book might also pass for a parody of D. H. Lawrence (were it not so abominably written) for the whole is so steeped in Lawrentian attitudes that it has the air of pastiche. It continuously advises us to turn our backs on the machine and the “brave new facade of modemity”171 and return to the old instinctual ways, never actually defined, yet always asserted to be better. About midway through this enormous and empty book, one realizes that the authors have begun to exude confidence that the danger is passing, the revolution has been thwarted, and the “bringing in line” may proceed in less venomous tones. There are still recurrent attacks and condemnations of “castrators” who fail to comply or object to the notion of obedience to male authority,172 but, on the whole, the authors come to prefer the method of positive injunction; feminine subordination is phrased as “supporting” “manliness” in its “wishes for domination.”173 At times one even detects a note of petition. All male activity, maleness, perhaps patriarchy itself, depend upon penile erection: “Here it is that mastery and domination, the central capacity of the man’s sexual nature must meet acceptance or fail.”174 To achieve erection, the male must be master. More recently, advocates of this notion of physiology have termed this the “cichlid effect,” a theory of human sexuality modeled on the reactions of a prehistoric fish whom Konrad Lorenz examined to conclude that male cichlids failed to find the courage to mate unless the female of their species responded with “awe.” How one measures “awe” in a fish is a question perhaps better left unanswered, but the implications of this notion that the female’s awe of the male is physically necessary to sexual intercourse are surely transparent enough if applied to men and women.175

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  If new ideological support were to come to the patriarchal social order, its sex roles and its differentiated temperaments of masculine and feminine, it could not come from religion, although the decades in question did sec a religious revival, particularly in the prestigious and influential quarters of literature and the university. T. S. Eliot’s piety and the sanctity of the fashionable neo-orthodoxy at Oxford and in the New Criticism could scarcely serve as a lifeboat for an entire society any more than could the wholesale defection of literary and critical minds from rationality into the caverns of myth. The new formulation of old attitudes had to come from science and particularly from the emerging social sciences of psychology, sociology, and anthropology—the most useful and authoritative branches of social control and manipulation. To be unassailable, there should be some connection, however dubious, with the more readily validated sciences of biology, mathematics, and medicine. To fill the needs of conservative societies and a population too reluctant or too perplexed to carry out revolutionary changes in social life, even to the drastic modification of basic units such as the family, a number of new prophets arrived upon the scene to clothe the old doctrine of the separate spheres in the fashionable language of science. The most influential of these was Sigmund Freud, beyond question the strongest individual counterrevolutionary force in the ideology of sexual politics during the period. Although popular in England and on the continent in Lawrence’s time, the prestige of Freud’s sexual theories did not arrive at, still less maintain, such complete ascendancy there as they achieved in the United States. In America, the influence of Freud is almost incalculable, and America, in many ways the first center of the sexual revolution, appears to have need of him. Although generally accepted as a prototype of the liberal urge toward sexual freedom, and a signal contributor toward softening traditional puritanical inhibitions upon sexuality, the effect of Freud’s work, that of his followers, and still more that of his popularizers, was to rationalize the invidious relationship between the sexes, to ratify traditional roles, and to validate temperamental differences. By an irony nearly tragic, the discoveries of a great pioneer, whose theories of the unconscious and of infant sexuality were major contributions to human understanding, were in time invoked to sponsor a point of view essentially conservative. And as regards the sexual revolution’s goal of liberating female humanity from its traditional subordination, the Freudian position came to be pressed into the service of a strongly counterrevolutionary attitude. Although the most unfortunate effects of vulgar Freudianism far exceeded the intentions of Freud himself, its anti-feminism was not without foundation in Freud’s own work.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In contemporary terminology, the basic division of temperamental trait is marshaled along the line of “aggression is male” and “passivity is female.” All other temperamental traits are somehow-often with the most dexterous ingenuity-aligned to correspond. If aggressiveness is the trait of the master class, docility must be the corresponding trait of a subject group. The usual hope of such line of reasoning is that “nature,” by some impossible outside chance, might still be depended upon to rationalize the patriarchal system. An important consideration to be remembered here is that in patriarchy, the function of norm is unthinkingly delegated to the male-were it not, one might as plausibly speak of “feminine” behavior as active, and “masculine” behavior as hyperactive or hyperaggressive. Here it might be added, by way of a coda, that data from physical sciences has recently been enlisted again to support sociological arguments, such as those of Lionel Tiger19 who seeks a genetic justification of patriarchy by proposing a “bonding instinct” in males which assures their political and social control of human society. One sees the implication of such a theory by applying its premise to any ruling group. Tiger’s thesis appears to be a misrepresentation of the work of Lorenz and other students of animal behavior. Since his evidence of inherent trait is patriarchal history and organization, his pretensions to physical evidence are both specious and circular. One can only advance genetic evidence when one has genetic (rather than historical) evidence to advance. As many authorities dismiss the possibility of instincts (complex inherent behavioral patterns) in humans altogether, admitting only reflexes and drives (far simpler neural responses),20 the prospects of a “bonding instinct” appear particularly forlorn. Should one regard sex in humans as a drive, it is still necessary to point out that the enormous area of our lives, both in early “socialization” and in adult experience, labeled “sexual behavior,” is almost entirely the product of learning. So much is this the case that even the act of coitus itself is the product of a long series of learned responses-responses to the patterns and attitudes, even as to the object of sexual choice, which are set up for us by our social environment. The arbitrary character of patriarchal ascriptions of temperament and role has little effect upon their power over us. Nor do the mutually exclusive, contradictory, and polar qualities of the categories “masculine” and “feminine” imposed upon human personality give rise to sufficiently serious question among us. Under their aegis each personality becomes little more, and often less than half, of its human potential. Politically, the fact that each group exhibits a circumscribed but complementary personality and range of activity is of secondary importance to the fact that each represents a status or power division. In the matter of conformity patriarchy is a governing ideology without peer; it is probable that no other system has ever exercised such a complete control over its subjects. III SOCIOLOGICAL

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  No matter how irresponsible an individual a husband might be, nor how careless of the welfare of his children, he was legally entitled to demand and receive the wife’s wages at any moment, even to the peril of his dependents’ lives. As head of the proprietary family, the husband was the sole “owner” of wife and children, empowered to deprive the mother of her offspring, who were his legal possessions, should it please him to do so upon divorcing or deserting her. A father, like a slaver, could order the law to reclaim his chattel-property relatives when he liked. Wives might be detained against their will; English wives who refused to return to their homes were subject to imprisonment. Should the husband die intestate, the state might pick over his property (for all property was legally his) leaving the widow nothing at all, or as little as it chose to bestow upon her. New York law was edifying and punctilious here; regardless of the number of her children, it enumerated the following as her due: The family Bible, pictures, school books, and all books not exceeding the sum of $50; spinning wheels, weaving looms, and stoves; ten sheep and their fleeces, two swine and their pork…All necessary wearing apparel, beds, bedsteads, and bedding; the clothing of the widow and ornaments proper to her stationone table, six chairs, six knives and forks, six tea-cups and saucers, one sugar dish, one milk pot, one tea-pot, and six spoons.4 The closest analogue to marriage was feudalism. Lest a woman entertain any doubts over her serf status, the wedding ceremony, with its injunctions to subordinance and obedience, was perfectly clear upon this point. St. Paul abjured the bride to be obedient unto her husband as unto the Lord, a behest more powerful to the pious (and care was taken that women receive large doses of piety) than any mere secular command. Secular law was equally explicit and ruled that when man and woman became “one,” that one was the man. It would be difficult to find a more perfect definition of subservience than the one Blackstone’s Commentary gives in explaining the wife’s position in common law; By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband…But though our law in general considers man and wife as one person, yet there are some instances in which she is separately considered; as inferior to him, and acting by his compulsion.5 When Henry Blackwell married Lucy Stone in 1855, this liberal gentleman and feminist renounced a formidable set of legal prerogatives which came to him with the contract. The text of this abdication has a certain period charm:

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  On another occasion, when speaking of the success of psychotherapy in the case of a man over thirty who became “creative” through treatment, Freud regretted that women of the same age are rigid and incapable of growth, their characters having long before responded to their limited natural patterns. Although “an individual woman may be a human being in other respects as well” one must remember Freud warns that “their nature is determined by their sexual function” and that “that influence extends very far.”132 In woman’s case it extends far enough to place her in a category one might, in general, term infra-human. Such is the effect of the “anatomy is destiny” formula; it has the incontestable force of primate limitations. In another age, it might have been easy to excuse Freud on the grounds of a particularly severe patriarchal upbringing, but his most influential work was done in the first three decades of the twentieth century, much of it ‘in the very midst of the sexual revolution. There was, therefore, plenty of historical information, and a whole climate of opinion at hand to assist him in recovering from a male-supremacist bias. In reply to feminist critics (and he was continually beset by them during these years) Freud conceded nothing, or responded with irrelevant banter, amused to acknowledge that not all men are paragons of masculinity, and that some women can nearly attain the characteristic virtues of masculinity, unseemly and misguided though they be to do SO.133 Somewhat analogously, other forms of prejudice are eager to concede an exceptional peasant or Negro or native; this confirms the rule. Refusing to debate the matter seriously, Freud took refuge in a circular tautology: when attacked for masculine prejudice, he responded by accusing his detractors of defensiveness, claiming they were male-oriented in aspiring to objectivity. He himself seemed incapable of imagining objectivity as a nonmasculine related quality. Freud is not only confident his opponents were wrong in believing otherwise, but that his own theoretical model of the debilitated female super-ego proved them wrong.134

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  “Repression” supports entitlement: de-repression. The ideology of sexual repression serves to strengthen masculine entitlement to sexual access to women whatever women say they want, casting any form of no to sex as a superficial veil of imposed social learning that contradicts deeper natural desires. Kate exposed Norman Mailer as harboring a repression hypothesis about violence.7 But suppose sexual violence is as sexual as it is violent? The ubiquitous “no means yes” exemplifies the sexual repression hypothesis, which is fundamentally Freudian. Kate otherwise skewered Freud, noting that since he was admittedly ignorant of what women want, it was unfortunate he proceeded to construct a female sexual psychology (178). While he could have opened the door to studies of the effect of male supremacist culture on the ego development of the young woman, she observed trenchantly, he instead sanctified her oppression as inevitable and biological (187), centering on a fear of castration, which generally has not happened,8 rather than on rape, which does (184). More consistent with Kate’s central analysis (if not raised) is that yes, under coercive conditions of socialization and legal impunity, can frequently mean no. Rereading Sexual Politics today might suggest, in light of what is known now about rape, sexual harassment, pornography,9 prostitution,10 sexual abuse of children, and the changed relation of sex to gender in the family, as well as further information on terrorism and war (“As sex is war, war is sexual” [316, on Mailer].), is that male dominance, potentiated and centrally entitled and expressed sexually, is indeed the key to politics. But the family is just one of the less central forms it takes, at least in some societies. As Dworkin once put it, “who is daddy having sex with and why?” 11 defines the family. Male-dominant sexuality pervades society, simultaneously affecting and infusing all social relations in all sectors, sexualizing them, rather than narratively and linearly beginning in “the family” and chronologically spreading out from there. Viewed in this way, sexuality in its male-dominant form is the mainspring of politics alright, but its social existence is simultaneous and all-infused,12 with the family just one ossified excrescence. To reify a single form of the relational dynamic Kate Millett brilliantly identified would be to mistake consequence for cause, to confuse a dynamic with one of its products, and to minimize the implications of that dynamic short of where she herself went with it—into war,13 terrorism, prostitution,14 and sexual murder.15 A reading of Sexual Politics in the context of her larger oeuvre, as well as in the context of contemporary developments in which gay and lesbian marriage is being permitted by male dominance to produce the families in law that these unions have long had in life,16 supports what history and diverse kinship and clan and tribal patterns suggest: that male dominance readily survives alterations in and diversity of family form without changing the domination of men over women society-wide. The adaptability of male supremacy is part of its genius and one of its hallmarks.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The three most distinguishing traits of female personality, were, in Freud’s view, passivity, masochism, and narcissism. Even here, one can see a certain merit in the Freudian paradigm taken as pure description. The position of women in patriarchy is such that they are expected to be passive, to suffer, and to be sexual objects; it is unquestionable that they are, with varying degrees of success, socialized into such roles. This is not however what Freud had in mind. Nor had he any intention of describing social circumstances. Instead, he believed that the elaborate cultural construction we call “femininity” was largely organic, e.g., identical with, or clearly related to, femaleness.108 He therefore proceeded to define femininity as constitutional passivity, masochism, and narcissism. He also prescribed it as the norm not only of general development, but of healthy development. The leading feminine characteristic, passivity, is achieved for example “with the abandonment of clitoridal masturbation” and the onset of maternal craving in the Oedipal stage, and this upsurge of femininity is “accompanied principally with the help of passive instinctual impulses.”109 Masochism and passivity, Freud would have us understand, are not only both feminine but dynamically interrelated: masochism comprises all passive attitudes to sexual life and object.110 It is therefore normal in females, abnormal in males. He also provides another general description by saying that in masochism “the subject is placed in a situation characteristic of womanhood, i.e., they mean that he is being castrated, is playing the passive role in coitus, or is giving birth.”111 Masochism is female; femininity is masochistic. It is ingenious to describe masochism and suffering as inherently feminine. Not only does it express masculine attitudes toward female functions (they are painful, degrading, etc.), it justifies any conceivable domination or humiliation forced upon the female as mere food for her nature. To carry such a notion to its logical conclusion, abuse is not only good for woman but the very thing she craved; The Story of O is an extreme statement made upon such assumptions. No better rationalization could be found for continuing to punish the victim. As an added attraction cruelty is erotic since it fulfills both partners’ natures. Nearly any atrocity committed against woman may eventually be extenuated on the theory of her innate masochism. Freud might have been appalled had he dwelt on the full possibilities of such an attribution to this or any other disadvantaged group. Of the three varieties of masochism Freud outlined—“erotogenic.” “moral,” and “feminine,” he merged two, the feminine with the erotogenic’s “lust for pain,” which he admitted is in itself difficult to explain, even in women. Hinting at the inscrutable, the inexplicable—a favorite technique when discussing woman-Freud hovers provocatively over such ideas as “some secret relationship with masochism” and titillates us with reports of an appetite for pain which “remains incomprehensible unless one can bring oneself to make certain assumptions about matters that are veiled in obscurity.”112

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Tennyson for a time is almost persuaded by the eloquence of Ida’s feminism which comes through despite the heavy-handed burlesque under which he tries to drape it. Princess Ida is exciting. The poet’s hero wishes to marry her, but he is not prepared to marry an equal. Siege must be laid to tame her into a docile but slightly above-average housewife whose additional accomplishment is a discarded bit of learning, abdicated to the higher cause of service to ego and his heirs. An unpleasant presentiment has occurred to the poet—what would happen to men if women were their intellectual equals? Would they be rejected, no longer served and soothed? Ida’s demand for equality in education is obviously cutting too close. In fact it might wreck Victorian marriage. Years later, Mill twitted anti-feminist resistance by saying that it regarded marriage—as it was—as so uninviting a proposition that all other options had to be closed to women, lest they refuse to marry. This might appear to be mere sarcasm, but in fact chivalry did apprehend that women would cease to enter into marriage on the terms expected of them when education gave them other choices. That is why The Princess, in a curious, otherwise inexplicable manner proceeds to “change the subject” from education to marriage. Masculine security appears to depend on Tennyson’s ability to turn the rebel’s head from learning to love. Ida’s almost humble request to be allowed to enter upon the cultural heritage of civilization must be made to seem outrageous and grotesque. Tennyson insists on turning her woman’s college hope of attaining intellectual equality into a separatist Amazon fantasy of his own, part mockery, part titillation. The poem makes use of a “framing” narrative device, and the tale of the princess herself is told by a bunch of undergraduates. There are songs interspersed throughout the text, the bulk of them frank propaganda for hearth and home and these latter morsels of domestic piety are placed in the mouths of the girls who listen-they are not otherwise permitted to intervene in the discussion of their fate. Tennyson’s actual premise is that Ida may study or love; not both. As the male has no intention of sharing his university, the female can only set up her own artificial alternate culture, a project the poet regards as both futile and silly. He has loaded the question by blowing up the period’s own solution of segregated education to the proportions of a totally segregated society. All this is an interesting comment on the Victorian feeling that the female must relinquish sexuality if she is to be in any sense autonomous, a variant on the bondage of “virtue” which demands sexual inhibition in a woman if she is to maintain her social and therefore her economic position.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  A major fly in the revolutionary ointment is that what was called “the sexual revolution” at the time—and Kate theorized as thoroughly anti-patriarchal—was not coterminous with women’s liberation. Not even close. Even as it let loose the idea of women’s sexual freedom into the world, opening up the exploration of the infiltration of male-dominant sex in all aspects of power relations society-wide, it also liberated male dominance sexually. As Andrea Dworkin observed of “the antifeminism of sexual-liberation movements,” the “unlimited sexual use of women by men is defined as freedom for both: she wants it; he responds; voila! the revolution.”6 In Kate’s view as well, “it was against patriarchy that the sexual revolution was directed” (65). Would that it turned out that way. Her definition of feminism is “a system of political, economic, and social equality between the sexes” that involves “a sexual revolution in fact” (74). She clearly imagines freeing women’s sexuality—women, period—from the imposed masochism and violation of male-dominant sexuality. Regrettably, this is not what “the sexual revolution” did. Beyond stigmatizing critique of sexual violation as frigidity and prudery, it has come to the point where it is not uncommon for men to show women pornography—characterized throughout Sexual Politics as hostile, sadistic, and lethally assaultive at its core (see, e.g., 44–45, 45–46, 288, 291–92) and a privilege of fascist elites (167)—to tell them that this is what the women’s liberation of feminism means. Sexual freedom has largely come to refer to freedom for women not only to act sexually as women have always been constrained to act, as if that is now empowerment, but also to act like men are permitted to act sexually: to use and discard, without human connection, the “onerous and coercive sexuality” Kate distinguished from a free one (xxi). Kate does not envision further freeing sexual access to women on men’s terms when she speaks of sexual freedom as being inhibited and posits the goal of “retir[ing] sex from the harsh realities of politics” (363). Fucking our way to freedom was not her revolution. Yet, with many at the time and still, she saw the problem of sexuality as principally being its suppression, which produces its violence and sale. Now that we know more, it seems worth asking whether sexuality ever has actually been generically repressed. From the evidence we have, it seems more accurate to observe that, for dominant groups in any event, it is and has been expressed and expressed and expressed. Her apparent assumption that freeing women sexually will produce no more sexual subordination and will destroy patriarchy seems misplaced, at best overoptimistic, in light of the overwhelming data on sexual force. What account do we have of where a free sexuality, unmarked by eroticized power, would come from?

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  As the Freudian understanding of female personality is based upon the idea of penis envy, it requires an elaborate, and often repetitious, exposition.58 Beginning with the theory of penis envy, the definition of the female is negative-what she is is the result of the fact that she is not a male and “lacks” a penis. Freud assumed that the female’s discovery of her sex is, in and of itself, a catastrophe of such vast proportions that it haunts a woman all through life and accounts for most aspects of her temperament. His entire psychology of women, from which all modern psychology and psychoanalysis derives heavily, is built upon an original tragic experience-born female. Purportedly, Freud is here only relaying the information supplied by women themselves, the patients who furnished his clinical data, the basis of his later generalities about all women. It was in this way, Freud believed, he had been permitted to see how women accepted the idea that to be born female is to be born “castrated”: As we learn from psycho-analytic work, women regard themselves as wronged from infancy, as undeservedly cut short and set back; and the embitterment of so many daughters against their mothers derives, in the last analysis, from the reproach against her of having brought them into the world as women instead of as men.59 Assuming that this were true, the crucial question, manifestly, is to ask why this might be so. Either maleness is indeed an inherently superior phenomenon, and in which case its “betterness” could be empirically proved and demonstrated, or the female misapprehends and reasons erroneously that she is inferior. And again, one must ask why. What forces in her experience, her society and socialization have led her to see herself as an inferior being? The answer would seem to lie in the conditions of patriarchal society and the inferior position of women within this society. But Freud did not choose to pursue such a line of reasoning, preferring instead an etiology of childhood experience based upon the biological fact of anatomical differences. While it is supremely unfortunate that Freud should prefer to bypass the more likely social hypothesis to concentrate upon the distortions of infantile subjectivity, his analysis might yet have made considerable sense were he sufficiently objective to acknowledge that woman is born female in a masculine-dominated culture which is bent upon extending its values even to anatomy and is therefore capable of investing biological phenomena with symbolic force. In much the same manner we perceive that the traumatizing circumstance of being born black in a white racist society invests skin color with symbolic value while telling us nothing about racial traits as such.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In such cases Freud and his school after him will do all in their power to convince her of the error of her ways: by gentle persuasion, harsh ridicule, and when vulgar Freudianism has come to power, by the actual mental policing of “pop psych.” The renegade must adjust or succumb. One is never enlightened as to what proof exists that all human (as distinct from biological or reproductive) pursuits, interesting or uninteresting, designated male “territory,” are in fact intrinsically so, or on what biological grounds it can be proven that literacy, the university, or the professions are really inherently male. It would be easy to say that Freud mistakes custom for inherency, the male’s domination of cultural modes for nature, but his hypothesis is so weighted with expedient interest that to do this would be to call him naïve. A philosophy which assumes that “the demand for justice is a modification of envy,”85 and informs the dispossessed that the circumstances of their deprivation are organic, therefore unalterable, is capable of condoning a great deal of injustice. One can predict the advice such a philosophy would have in store for other disadvantaged groups displeased with the status quo, and as the social and political effects of such lines of reasoning are fairly clear, it is not difficult to see why Freud finally became so popular a thinker in conservative societies. Freud had spurned an excellent opportunity to open the door to hundreds of enlightening studies on the effect of male-supremacist culture on the ego development of the young female, preferring instead to sanctify her oppression in terms of the inevitable law of “biology.” The theory of penis envy has so effectively obfuscated understanding that all psychology has done since has not yet unraveled this matter of social causation. If, as seems unlikely, penis envy can mean anything at all, it is productive only within the total cultural context of sex. And here it would seem that girls are fully cognizant of male supremacy long before they see their brother’s penis. It is so much a part of their culture, so entirely present in the favoritism of school and family, in the image of each sex presented to them by all media, religion, and in every model of the adult world they perceive, that to associate it with a boy’s distinguishing genital would, since they have learned a thousand other distinguishing sexual marks by now, be either redundant or irrelevant. Confronted with so much concrete evidence of the male’s superior status, sensing on all sides the depreciation in which they are held, girls envy not the penis, but only what the penis gives one social pretensions to. Freud appears to have made a major and rather foolish confusion between biology and culture, anatomy and status. It is still more apparent that his audience found such a confusion serviceable.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “And I recalled the state in which I was then. Not only did I recall it, but I again entered into the same bestial state. And suddenly there came to me a desire to act, and all reasoning, except such as was necessary to action, vanished from my brain, and I was in the condition of a beast, and of a man under the influence of physical excitement pending a danger, who acts imperturbably, without haste, and yet without losing a minute, pursuing a definite object. “The first thing that I did was to take off my boots, and now, having only stockings on, I advanced toward the wall, over the sofa, where firearms and daggers were hanging, and I took down a curved Damascus blade, which I had never used, and which was very sharp. I took it from its sheath. I remember that the sheath fell upon the sofa, and that I said to myself: ‘I must look for it later; it must not be lost.’ “Then I took off my overcoat, which I had kept on all the time, and with wolf-like tread started for the room. I do not remember how I proceeded, whether I ran or went slowly, through what chambers I passed, how I approached the dining-room, how I opened the door, how I entered. I remember nothing about it.” CHAPTER XXVII. “I remember only the expression of their faces when I opened the door. I remember that, because it awakened in me a feeling of sorrowful joy. It was an expression of terror, such as I desired. Never shall I forget that desperate and sudden fright that appeared on their faces when they saw me. He, I believe, was at the table, and, when he saw or heard me, he started, jumped to his feet, and retreated to the sideboard. Fear was the only sentiment that could be read with certainty in his face. In hers, too, fear was to be read, but accompanied by other impressions. And yet, if her face had expressed only fear, perhaps that which happened would not have happened. But in the expression of her face there was at the first moment—at least, I thought I saw it—a feeling of ennui, of discontent, at this disturbance of her love and happiness. One would have said that her sole desire was not to be disturbed in the moment of her happiness. But these expressions appeared upon their faces only for a moment. Terror almost immediately gave place to interrogation. Would they lie or not? If yes, they must begin. If not, something else was going to happen. But what?

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  She had wise, kindly eyes, was dressed in black silk, and brought us cold meat and eggs with our tea. Severin took one of the latter, and decapitated it with his knife. “Didn’t I tell you that I want them soft-boiled?” he cried with a violence that made the young woman tremble. “But my dear Sevtchu—” she said timidly. “Sevtchu, nothing,” he yelled, “you are to obey, obey, do you understand?” and he tore the kantchuk 1 which was hanging beside the weapons from its hook. [Footnote 1: A long whip with a short handle.] The woman fled from the chamber quickly and timidly like a doe. “Just wait, I’ll get you yet,” he called after her. “But Severin,” I said placing my hand on his arm, “how can you treat a pretty young woman thus?” “Look at the woman,” he replied, blinking humorously with his eyes. “Had I flattered her, she would have cast the noose around my neck, but now, when I bring her up with the kantchuk, she adores me.” “Nonsense!” “Nonsense, nothing, that is the way you have to break in women.” “Well, if you like it, live like a pasha in your harem, but don’t lay down theories for me—” “Why not,” he said animatedly. “Goethe’s ‘you must be hammer or anvil’ is absolutely appropriate to the relation between man and woman. Didn’t Lady Venus in your dream prove that to you? Woman’s power lies in man’s passion, and she knows how to use it, if man doesn’t understand himself. He has only one choice: to be the tyrant over or the slave of woman. As soon as he gives in, his neck is under the yoke, and the lash will soon fall upon him.” “Strange maxims!” “Not maxims, but experiences,” he replied, nodding his head, “I have actually felt the lash. I am cured. Do you care to know how?” He rose, and got a small manuscript from his massive desk, and put it in front of me. “You have already asked about the picture. I have long owed you an explanation. Here—read!” Severin sat down by the chimney with his back toward me, and seemed to dream with open eyes. Silence had fallen again, and again the fire sang in the chimney, and the samovar and the cricket in the old walls. I opened the manuscript and read: CONFESSIONS OF A SUPERSENSUAL MAN. The margin of the manuscript bore as motto a variation of the well-known lines from Faust: “Thou supersensual sensual wooer A woman leads you by the nose.” —MEPHISTOPHELES. I turned the title-page and read: “What follows has been compiled from my diary of that period, because it is impossible ever frankly to write of one’s past, but in this way everything retains its fresh colors, the colors of the present.”

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  So, weak and poor and scared, I let them call me names while I tried to figure out what to do. And it might have continued that way if Roger the Giant hadn’t taken it too far. It was lunchtime and I was standing outside by the weird sculpture that was supposed to be an Indian. I was studying the sky like I was an astronomer, except it was daytime and I didn’t have a telescope, so I was just an idiot. Roger the Giant and his gang of giants strutted over to me. “Hey, Chief,” Roger said. It seemed like he was seven feet tall and three hundred pounds. He was a farm boy who carried squealing pigs around like they were already thin slices of bacon. I stared at Roger and tried to look tough. I read once that you can scare away a charging bear if you wave your arms and look big. But I figured I’d just look like a terrified idiot having an arm seizure. “Hey, Chief,” Roger said. “You want to hear a joke?” “Sure,” I said. “Did you know that Indians are living proof that niggers fuck buffalo?” I felt like Roger had kicked me in the face. That was the most racist thing I’d ever heard in my life. Roger and his friends were laughing like crazy. I hated them. And I knew I had to do something big. I couldn’t let them get away with that shit. I wasn’t just defending myself. I was defending Indians, black people, and buffalo. So I punched Roger in the face. He wasn’t laughing when he landed on his ass. And he wasn’t laughing when his nose bled like red fireworks. I struck some fake karate pose because I figured Roger’s gang was going to attack me for bloodying their leader. But they just stared at me. They were shocked. “You punched me,” Roger said. His voice was thick with blood. “I can’t believe you punched me.” He sounded insulted. He sounded like his poor little feelings had been hurt. I couldn’t believe it. He acted like he was the one who’d been wronged. “You’re an animal,” he said. I felt brave all of a sudden. Yeah, maybe it was just a stupid and immature school yard fight. Or maybe it was the most important moment of my life. Maybe I was telling the world that I was no longer a human target. “You meet me after school right here,” I said. “Why?” he asked. I couldn’t believe he was so stupid. “Because we’re going to finish this fight.” “You’re crazy,” Roger said. He got to his feet and walked away. His gang stared at me like I was a serial killer, and then they followed their leader. I was absolutely confused.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “In order that you may understand me, I must tell you how this happened. We were living along, and all seemed well. Suddenly we began to talk of the children’s education. I do not remember what words either of us uttered, but a discussion began, reproaches, leaps from one subject to another. ‘Yes, I know it. It has been so for a long time.’ . . . ‘You said that.’ . . . ‘No, I did not say that.’ . . . ‘Then I lie?’ etc. “And I felt that the frightful crisis was approaching when I should desire to kill her or else myself. I knew that it was approaching; I was afraid of it as of fire; I wanted to restrain myself. But rage took possession of my whole being. My wife found herself in the same condition, perhaps worse. She knew that she intentionally distorted each of my words, and each of her words was saturated with venom. All that was dear to me she disparaged and profaned. The farther the quarrel went, the more furious it became. I cried, ‘Be silent,’ or something like that. “She bounded out of the room and ran toward the children. I tried to hold her back to finish my insults. I grasped her by the arm, and hurt her. She cried: ‘Children, your father is beating me.’ I cried: ‘Don’t lie.’ She continued to utter falsehoods for the simple purpose of irritating me further. ‘Ah, it is not the first time,’ or something of that sort. The children rushed toward her and tried to quiet her. I said: ‘Don’t sham.’ She said: ‘You look upon everything as a sham. You would kill a person and say he was shamming. Now I understand you. That is what you want to do.’ ‘Oh, if you were only dead!’ I cried.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Thus the Count expressed himself, celebrating his eccentricities; when I strove to speak to him of the Being to whom he owed everything, and of the grief such disorders caused his respectable aunt, I perceived nothing in him but spleen and ill-humor and especially impatience at having to see, in such hands and for so long, riches which, he would say, already ought to belong to him; I saw nothing but the most inveterate hatred for that so gentle woman, nothing but the most determined revolt against every natural sentiment. It would then be true that when in one's tastes one has been able so formally to transgress that law's sacred instinct, the necessary consequence of this original crime is a frightful penchant to commit every other. Sometimes I employed the means Religion provides; almost always comforted by it, I attempted to insinuate its sweetnesses into this perverse creature's soul, more or less certain he could be restrained by those bonds were I to succeed in having him strike at the lure; but the Count did not long tolerate my use of such weapons. A declared enemy of our most holy mysteries, a stubborn critic of the purity of our dogmas, an impassioned antagonist of the idea of a Supreme Being's existence, Monsieur de Bressac, instead of letting himself be converted by me, sought rather to work my corruption. "All religions start from a false premise, Therese," he would say; "each supposes as necessary the worship of a Creator, but that creator never existed. In this connection, put yourself in mind of the sound precepts of that certain Coeur-de-fer who, you told me, used to labor over your mind as I do; nothing more just, nor more precise, than that man's principles, and the degradation in which we have the stupidity to keep him does not deprive him of the right to reason well.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In dismissing the wider cultural context of feminine dissatisfaction and isolating it in early childhood experience, Freud again ignored the social context of childhood by locating a literal feminine “castration” complex in the child’s discovery of the anatomical differentiation between the sexes. Freud believed he had found the key to feminine experience—in that moment when girls discover they are “castrated”—a “momentous discovery which little girls are destined to make”: They notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of large proportions, at once recognize it as the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ, and from that time forward fall a victim to envy for the penis.60 There are several unexplained assumptions here: why is the girl instantly struck by the proposition that bigger is better? Might she just as easily, reasoning from the naïvete of childish narcissism imagine the penis is an excrescence and take her own body as norm? Boys clearly do, as Freud makes clear, and in doing so respond to sexual enlightenment not with the reflection that their own bodies are peculiar, but, far otherwise, with a “horror of the mutilated creature or triumphant contempt for her.”61 Secondly, the superiority of this “superior counterpart,” which the girl is said to “recognize at once” in the penis, is assumed to relate to the autoerotic satisfactions of childhood; but here again the child’s experience provides no support for such an assumption. Much of Freudian theory rests upon this moment of discovery and one is struck how, in the case of the female, to recapitulate the peculiar drama of penis envy is to rehearse again the fable of the Fall, a Fall that is Eve’s alone.62 As children, male and female first inhabit a paradisiacal playground where roles are interchangeable, active and passive, masculine and feminine. Until the awesome lapsarian moment when the female discovers her inferiority, her castration, we are asked to believe that she had assumed her clitoris a penis. One wonders why. Freud believes it is because she masturbated with it, and he assumes that she will conclude that what is best for such purposes must be a penis.63 Freud insists upon calling the period of clitoral autoeroticism “phallic” in girls.