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The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works. Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men—control, violence, insult, contempt—that no threat seems empty.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

#andrea dworkin #radical feminism #feminism #radblr #radfem #patriarchy

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Subjectivity is crucially constituted by relations of looking. Through active looking the subject acquires a sense of subject set off against objects... In the phallocratic order, however, this subject who takes pleasure in looking at objects other than himself and who takes pleasure in looking at totalized images of himself is a male subject. The phallocratic order splits looking into active and passive moments. The gaze is masculine, and that upon which it gazes is feminine. Women are only lack, the other that shores up the phallic subject, the object that gives power and unified identity to men’s looking. If women are to achieve any subjectivity it can only be through adopting this position of the male subject who takes pleasure in the objectification of women.

In film the activity of looking has two aspects—a voyeuristic and a fetishistic—and film positions women’s bodies in relation to both sorts of looking. Voyeuristic looking takes a distance from the object of its gaze, from which it is absent and elsewhere. From this distance the object of the gaze cannot return or reciprocate the gaze; the voyeur’s look is judgmental, holding power over the guilty object of the gaze by offering punishment or forgiveness. In fetishistic looking, on the other hand, the subject finds his likeness in the object, represented as the unity of the phallus. In film both voyeuristic and fetishistic looking deny the threatening difference of the female, either judging her lacking and guilty or turning her body or parts of her body into an icon in which the subject finds himself, his phallus.

—Iris M. Young, "On Female Body Experience: "Throwing Like a Girl" and Other Essays."

#iris marion young #feminism #radical feminism #radblr #theory #feminist theory

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"Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first stone axe."

Susan Brownmiller

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“The fact is, no man can ever know whether a child is his. A woman knows a child is hers, but a man can never know whether it is his, not even with a DNA test. A DNA test can only tell you if the child is not yours, but if your DNA matches, it only indicates ‘a high statistical probability’ that it is your child. As they say, ‘Motherhood is a biological fact, fatherhood is a sociological fiction.’ It is this knowledge that creates permanent anxiety for patriarchy, an anxiety that requires women’s sexuality to be strictly policed.”

― Nivedita Menon

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We find our love and hate focused through our feminism— love for other women bound by the same conditions, hate for the oppression that binds us. 

—Hyde Park Chapter, Chicago Women's Liberation Union

#feminism #international women's day #marxist feminism #socialist feminism #womanism #socialism #radical feminism #women's history month #intersectional feminism

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“Women’s oppression consists not merely in an inequality of status, power, and wealth resulting from men’s excluding them from privileged activities. The freedom, power, status, and self-realization of men is possible precisely because women work for them.”

— Iris M. Young, “Five Faces of Oppression”

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In the beginning ... was a very female sea. For two-and-a-half billion years on earth, all life-forms floated in the womb-like environment of the planetary ocean—nourished and protected by its fluid chemicals, rocked by the lunar-tidal rhythms. Charles Darwin believed the menstrual cycle originated here, organically echoing the moon-pulse of the sea. And, because this longest period of life's time on earth was dominated by marine forms reproducing parthenogenetically, he concluded that the female principle was primordial. In the beginning, life did not gestate within the body of any creature, but within the ocean womb containing all organic life. There were no specialized sex organs; rather, a generalized female existence reproduced itself within the female body of the sea.

Before more complex life forms could develop and move onto land, it was necessary to miniaturize the oceanic environment, to reproduce it on a small and mobile scale. Soft, moist eggs deposited on dry ground and exposed to air would die; life could not move beyond the water-hugging amphibian stage. In the course of evolution, the ocean—the protective and nourishing space, the amniotic fluids, even the lunar-tidal rhythm—was transferred into the individual female body. And the penis, a mechanical device for land reproduction, evolved.

The penis first appeared in the Age of Reptiles, about 200 million years ago. Our archetypal association of the snake with the phallus contains, no doubt, this genetic memory. This is a fundamental and recurring pattern in nature: Life is a female environment in which the male appears, often periodically, and by the female, to perform highly specialized tasks related to species reproduction and a more complex evolution.

.... Among mammals, even among humans, parthenogenesis is not technically impossible. Every female egg contains a polar body with a complete set of chromosomes; the polar body and the egg, if united, could form a daughter embryo. In fact, ovarian cysts are unfertilized eggs that have joined with their polar bodies, been implanted in the ovarian wall, and started to develop there.

This is not to say that males are an unnecessary sex. Parthenogenesis is a cloning process. Sexual reproduction, which enhances the variety and health of the gene pool, is necessary for the kind of complex evolution that has produced the human species. The point being made here is simply that, when it comes to the two sexes, one of us has been around a lot longer than the other.

—Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, "The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth."

#monica sjöö #cosmic mother #feminism #radical feminism #radblr #radfem #womanism #womanhood

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In a key scene in Red Dragon, an FBI agent tells a group of police officers that there is no doubt that the family serial killer will strike again. “Why?” one woman asks him. “Because it makes him God,” intones the agent. Just days after Red Dragon opened, the police found the Death card from a Tarot deck near the scene of one of the shootings. Inscribed on the card was a message from the shooter. It was reported in the media as reading: “Dear Policeman, I am God.”

Such grandiose allusions to divinity have long been a crucial part of the serial killer myth. They proliferate as well in technological, especially nuclear, mystique and metaphor, most famously when the erudite J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father” of the atomic bomb, named the bomb test site “Trinity” and then, while witnessing the first atomic blast, recited the god Krishna’s words from the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.”

More mundane occasions for such utterances occur regularly in popular playtimes. In the media storm that followed the discovery of the inscribed Tarot card in the Beltway case, the public learned that “I am God” is a common declaration by victorious players of violent video games. We were reminded that Eric Harris, one of the two teenaged boys who committed mass murder at Columbine High School in April 1999, was an avid video game player and had scribbled, “I am God” in another student’s yearbook.

The popularity of this phrase in all of these contexts points to a pervasive, if usually unexamined, recognition that violence, control, total power over others, and specifically masculine lethal violence or the power of “unnatural death,” all have a religious character in our culture. Despite much talk of God being “love” and associated with creation, the phrase “I am God” is not uttered in delivery rooms by mothers, or by those getting the news that they have received the Nobel Peace Prize. The dominant notion of god in the Abrahamic patriarchal religions is an all-male being whose defining characteristics seem to be omnipotence, jealousy, righteousness, judgment, and dominance. This notion of god powers all sorts of terrorism: religious, political, criminal, familial, militarist, nuclear, and any combination of these as power-mad men take up that mythic role, “playing god” by waging war, accumulating fortunes, toying with others’ lives, and lording it over everybody else.

—Jane Caputi, "Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture."

#jane caputi #feminism #radical feminism #radblr #patriarchy #radfem #feminist film theory #film theory

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Colonialism is a form of vampirism that empowers and bloats the self-image of the colonizing empire by draining the life energies of the colonized people; just enough blood is left to allow the colonial subject to perform a day’s work for the objective empire. And these drained energies are not only of the present and future, but of the past, of memory itself: the continuity of identity of a people, and of each individual who is colonized.

No one should recognize this process better than women; for the female sex has functioned as a colony of organized patriarchal power for several thousand years now. Our brains have been emptied out of all memory of our own cultural history, and the colonizing power systematically denies such a history ever existed. The colonizing power mocks our attempts to rediscover and celebrate our ancient matriarchies as realities. In the past women have had to accept this enforced female amnesia as “normal”; and many contemporary women continue to believe the female sex has existed always and ab aeterno as an auxiliary to the male-dominated world order. But we continue to dig in the ruins, seeking the energy of memory; believing that the reconstruction of women’s ancient history has a revolutionary potential equal to that of any political movement today.

—Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, "The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth."

#monica sjöö #feminism #radical feminism #radblr #patriarchy #womanism #marxist feminism #colonialism #anti imperialism

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The sex act as a violation, as an act establishing the inferiority and servility of women, has its most violently brutal expression in the act of rape. Rape is a social punishment and an affirmation of male superiority and female bestiality, buttressed by the bourgeois morality’s “animal” image of woman, the Madonna-Whore, as one who secretly “enjoys” her degradation and humiliation in the act of forcible rape. This is why rapists often ask their victims if they had a climax. Rape is a particularly vicious and sadistic manifestation of the general nature of sexuality as defined by the bourgeois morality — the reality under the hypocritical expressions of “sacred motherhood” and the “lady” on her asexual pedestal.

The severe alienation produced by oppressive and repressive sexual norms and ideals finds its real expression in the horrendous rate of forcible rape and child rape. Rape is an expression of aggression and hatred vented upon a social inferior; it is an act of spiritual murder even when it is not accompanied by murder in fact. Against the image of the “pure and virtuous asexual woman” is the dark counter-image of woman as victim, of a creature whose slow and bloody torturing to death is a source of sexual satisfaction and pleasure.

—Marlene Dixon, "Left-Wing Anti-Feminism: A Revisionist Disorder."

#marlene dixon #feminism #marxist feminism #radblr #radfem #marxism #socialist feminism

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“In my own case, I had to train myself out of that phony smile, which is like a nervous tic on every teenage girl. And this meant that I smiled rarely, for in truth, when it came down to real smiling, I had less to smile about. My ‘dream’ action for the women’s liberation movement: a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their 'pleasing’ smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them.”

— Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

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When women demand and express our intellectual, sexual, and emotional freedom, society responds with both overtly woman-hating pornography and the increased fetishization of children. In pornographic videos, women are marked with cosmetics, clothing, and coiffeurs to suggest that they are children or teenagers. In everyday pornography, sexually objectified women are shown in poses and clothing that suggests that they are little girls and actual little girls are made up and dressed up as if they were adult seductresses.

An ad from 1975 pitching Love's Baby Soft fragrance dispenses with all subtlety. It depicts a heavily made-up child with an elaborate adult coiffeur. She is about six years old. The headline reads: "Love's Baby Soft. Because innocence is sexier than you think." The ad blatantly positions the young girl as a sex object and acknowledges that it is her "innocence" that makes her such a suitable erotic target. Although this appears paradoxical, it makes perfect pornographic sense. The "moralistic" ethic puts chastity next to godliness and makes sex "dirty," defiling a supposed bodily and spiritual "purity." Sexual gratification of any kind then becomes all bound up not only with taboo violation, but also with defilement.

—Jane Caputi, "Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture."

#jane caputi #feminism #women against pornography #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #anti porn

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In the future, things will be different from the long past as women come into their own: “The future is woman’s — as quickly as she realizes her present frustration, and her tremendously powerful potentialities ... The important thing is that a vast army of women has begun to move forward into male territory. Eventually they will conquer their own feelings of female inadequacy.” With woman’s feeling of inadequacy cast off and her potentialities released into full action, civilization will advance, for women have the qualities necessary for the triumph of civilization.

—Mary Beard, "Woman as a Force in History: A Study in Traditions and Realities."

#mary beard #feminism #radical feminism #radblr #radfem #the future is female #gynofuturism

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Whose class interests (excepting those of the bourgeoisie) are served by advocating the desirability of contractual marriage and the consequent perpetuation of the subjugation of women? If we look at its material basis, we find that proletarian anti-feminism is most characteristic of those strata of the proletariat whose wages are sufficient to maintain a family at an average working-class standard of living. In such strata, where wages are adequate, a woman whose labor power is privately appropriated is a real bargain, for the same services, if waged, would be totally out of reach of the men.

Proletarian anti-feminism represents the particular material interests of highly paid, unionized male workers vis-a-vis women. The subjugation of women serves as a "natural" restriction upon the employment of female labor, and thus partially controls competition in the labor force. It keeps women unorganized and powerless in labor organizations. It secures male workers the benefits that accrue to them through their right to privately appropriate female labor power as well as the psychological "benefit" of always having a woman inferior to serve as a waitress, lover and servant, securely dependent and, at least theoretically, humbly grateful. No matter how low a man might fall, his wife is lower yet; no matter how powerless a man may truly be, his home is his castle and his subjects his wife and children.

—Marlene Dixon, "Left-Wing Anti-Feminism: A Revisionist Disorder."

#marlene dixon #radical feminism #radblr #marxist feminism #socialist feminism #marxism #feminism #proletarian feminism

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Male aggression feeds on female masochism as vultures feed on carrion. Our nonviolent project is to find the social, sexual, political, and cultural forms which repudiate our programmed submissive behaviors, so that male aggression can find no dead flesh on which to feast.

andrea dworkin, our blood

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Although pornography is rumored to be all about lust and sexual excitement, in the long run pornography is about desensitization, disconnection, the constriction of the sexual imagination, and the increasing appeal of control and sadism to that numbed sensorium.

Pornographic objectification is a process whereby a sentient being is dehumanized; someone is turned into something that can be exchanged, owned, shown off, abused, disposed of, and used as a means to someone else's ends. And the truth is, if you dehumanize others, you unavoidably do it to yourself as well.

—Jane Caputi, "Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture."

#jane caputi #feminism #anti porn #marxist feminism #radical feminism #radblr #radfem

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Pornography is regularly used in ways that have nothing to do with sexual explicitness. Rather, pornography is commonly understood as a form of propaganda, a representational style linked with defamation and desensitization, if not destruction. Patricia J. Williams, who thinks legally, critically, and gracefully about race, sex, and injustice, calls pornography a "habit of thinking," and one that informs all manner of abusive and exploitative attitudes and relationships. Pornography, as I am using the term, is just that, a worldview, a way of thinking and acting that sexualizes and genders domination and submission, from the bedroom to the war room, making domination masculine (even when a woman plays that role) and submission feminine (even when a man plays that role), and making both the essence of sex. By wedding sexuality to inequality, pornography conditions women and men to have a substantial investment in maintaining the oppressive status quo—again, from interpersonal relationships to international politics.

Pornography kills off, and then substitutes itself for, the erotic—the life force, the earthy and ethereal force of growth, fruitfulness, exuberance, ecstasy, connectedness, and integrity. Pornography severs eroticism from intimacy and empathy and bonds it to voyeurism and objectification (of the self and of another). It incarnates pleasure in acts of hatred. It would have all of us believe, even those of us getting the "fuzzy end of the lollypop" (Sugar/Marilyn Monroe's lament in Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder, 1959), that without a certain measure of power and powerlessness, danger, fear, pain, possession, shame, distance, and violence there wouldn't be any "sex" at all. Of course, the simultaneously pornographic, monotonous, and erotophobic culture tends to make that true. Variously damaged, alienated, and desensitized, pornography can become what we need in order to feel at all.

Some applaud pornography because it allows access to sexual imagery and language and easily offends offensive religious morality. Yet pornography is no real alternative to systemic sex-negative morality; rather it is an intrinsic part of it. Pornography and mainstream morality both stem from and continually reinforce a worldview that first makes a complex of body/low/sex/dirty/deviant/female/devil and then severs these from mind/high/spirit/pure/normal/male/god. For both, sex itself is the core taboo. Moralism systematically upholds the taboo and pornography systematically violates it. In the complex that evolves from this absurdity, taboo violation itself becomes erotically charged. Evil becomes seductive and the good mostly boring. Without patriarchal moralism's misogyny, homophobia, demand for sexual ignorance, and sin-sex-shame equation, pornography as we know it would not exist. And, together, the two work to maintain the sex and gender status quo.

—Jane Caputi, "Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture."

#jane caputi #feminism #radical feminism #radblr #radfem #women against pornography #anti-porn #feminist film theory