Woman Hating

Heterosexuality, which is properly defined as the ritualized behavior built on polar role definition, and the social institutions related to it (marriage, the family, the Church, ad infinitum) are “human nature. ”

As individuals, we experience ourselves as the center of whatever social world we inhabit. We think that we are free and refuse to see that we are functions of our particular culture.

We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist’s maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.

They have one scenario of passage. They are moved, as if inert, from the house of the mother to the house of the prince. First they are objects of malice, then they are objects of romantic adoration. They do nothing to warrant either.

Women strive for passivity, because women want to be good. The abuse evoked by that passivity convinces women that they are bad. The bad need to be punished, destroyed, so that they can become good.

As a Native American, I would be oppressed as a squaw, but hunted, slaughtered, as a Native American. That first identity, the one which brings with it as part of its definition death, is the identity of primary emergency.

the racist class structure of Amerika today, assured that wherever one stood, it was with at least one foot heavy on the belly of another human being.

The fact is that consciousness, once experienced, cannot be denied. Once women experienced themselves as activists and began to understand the reality and meaning of oppression, they began to articulate a politically conscious feminism.

To sum up, Story of O is a story of psychic cannibalism, demonic possession, a story which posits men and women as being at opposite poles of the universe — the survival of one dependent on the absolute destruction of the other. It asks, like many stories, who is the most powerful, and it answers: men are, literally over women’s dead bodies.

They mark her as an owned object and in no way symbolize the passage into maturity and freedom. The same might be said of the conventional wedding ring.