I used writing to take language where women’s pain was – and women’s fear – and I kept excavating for the words that could bear the burden of speaking the unspeakable...
Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake – it embodies sexuality as the the culture defines it.
The victim of encapsulating violence carries both the real fear and the memory of fear with her always. Together, they wash over her like an ocean, and if she does not learn to swim in that terrible sea, she goes under.
The numbers grow as the technology and its accessibility grow. The technology by its very nature encourages more and more passive acquiescence to the graphic depictions. Passivity makes the already credulous consumer more credulous. He comes to the pornography a believer; he goes away from it a missionary.
You damn well better believe that you’re involved in this tragedy and that it’s your tragedy too. Because you’re turned into little soldier boys from the day that you are born and everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the world in which you live.
And I want one day of respite, one day off, one day in which no new bodies are piled up, one day in which no new agony is added to the old, and I am asking you to give it to me. And how could I ask you for less – it is so little. And how could you offer me less: it is so little. Even in wars, there are days of truce. Go and organize a truce. Stop your side for one day. I want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there is no rape.
I love the literature that these men created; but I will not live my life as if they are real and I am not. Nor will I tolerate the continuing assumption that they know more about women than we know about ourselves.
I think God is really a ruthless artist and earth is an early draft. This draft was bad, overloaded with gratuitous cruelty. Love doesn’t work. Pride is a sin. Nothing we do is right.
My own experience is that night and day are more alike than different – in which case they couldn’t possibly be opposite.
It was the pornographers, not feminists, who punished women in the public square, as puritans had, for being sexual.
Des Pres says it is easier to kill if “the victim exhibits self disgust; if he cannot lift his eyes for humiliation, or if lifted they show only emptiness... ” There is some pornography in which women are that abject, that easy to kill, that close to being dead already.
What I’ve learned is that women suffer from terrible shame and the shame comes from having been complicit in abuse because one wants to live.
I will say here what I have never said before: my pacifism was not challenged by the beating and torture I experienced in marriage some thirty years ago; I finally got away not because I knew that he would kill me but because I thought I would kill him.
Will feminism be a political movement that confronts the power of men over women in order to dismantle that power; or will feminism be a “lifestyle” choice, a post-modernist fad, a cyclically noted fashion?
The questions now really are: why is pornography credible in our society? how can anyone believe it? And then: how subhuman would women have to be for the pornography to be true? To the men who use the pornography, how subhuman are women?
The appeals judge said that pornography did all the harm we claimed – it promoted insult and injury, rape and assault, even caused women to have lower wages – and that these effects proved its power as speech; therefore, it had to be protected.
Being naked takes on different values, according to the self-consciousness of the one who is naked; or according to the consciousness of the one who is looking at the nakedness. The men are tortured in their minds by the meaning of being naked, especially by the literal nakedness of women but also by their own nakedness: what it means to be seen and to be vulnerable. The nakedness of the women they look at, interpret, desire, associate with acts of violence they want to commit.
There is a misery of the body and a misery of the mind, and if the stars, whenever we looked at them, poured nectar into our mouths, and the grass became bread, we would still be sad. We live in a system that manufactures sorrow, spilling it out of its mill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm, and we drown down, dead, too soon.
Prostitution means for the woman the carnal annihilation of will and choice, but for the man it once again signifies an increase in power, pure and simple.
Women experience the world as mystery. Kept ignorant of technology, economics, most of the practical skills required to function autonomously, kept ignorant of the real social and sexual demands made on women, deprived of physical strength, excluded from forums for the development of intellectual acuity and public self-confidence, women are lost and mystified by the savage momentum of an ordinary life.