which must be filled—either by a phallus or by a child, which
is viewed as an extension of the phallus. Erik Erikson’s rendition of this male fantasy sanctified it for psychologists. Erikson wrote:
No doubt also, the very existence of the inner productive space
exposes women early to a specific sense of loneliness, to a fear of
being left empty or deprived of treasures, of remaining unfulfilled
and of drying up. . . in female experience an “inner space” is
at the center of despair even as it is the very center of potential
fulfillment. Emptiness is the female form of perdition. . . [it is]
standard experience for all women. To be left, for her, means to
be left empty. . . Such hurt can be re-experienced in each
menstruation; it is a crying to heaven in the mourning over a
child; and it becomes a permanent scar in the menopause. 8
It is no wonder, then, that men recognize us only when we
have a phallus attached to us in the course of sexual intercourse or when we are pregnant. Then we are for them real women; then we have, in their eyes, an identity, a function, a
verifiable existence; then, and only then, we are not “empty. ”
The isolation of this male pathology, by the way, sheds some
light on the abortion struggle. In a society in which the only
recognizable worth is phallic worth, it is unconscionable for a
woman to choose to “be empty inside, ” to choose to be “deprived of treasures. ” The womb is dignified only when it is the repository of holy goods—the phallus or, since men want
sons, the fetal son. To abort a fetus, in masculinist terms, is to
commit an act of violence against the phallus itself. It is akin
to chopping off a cock. Because a fetus is perceived of as
having a phallic character, its so-called life is valued very
highly, while the woman’s actual life is worthless and invisible
since she can make no claim to phallic potentiality.
It may sound peculiar, at first, to speak of fear as the absence of courage. We know, all of us, that fear is vivid, actual, physiologically verifiable— but then, so is the vagina. We live
in a male-imagined world, and our lives are circumscribed by
the limits of male imagination. Those limits are very severe.
As women, we learn fear as a function of our so-called
femininity. We are taught systematically to be afraid, and we
are taught that to be afraid not only is congruent with femininity, but also inheres in it. We are taught to be afraid so that we will not be able to act, so that we will be passive, so that we
will be women— so that we will be, as Aristotle put it so
charmingly, “afflicted with a natural defectiveness. ”
In Woman Hating, I described how this process is embodied
in the fairy tales we all learn as children:
The lessons are simple, and we learn them well.
Men and women are different, absolute opposites.
The heroic prince can never be confused with Cinderella, or
Snow-white, or Sleeping Beauty. She could never do what he
does at all, let alone better.. . .
Where he is erect, she is supine. Where he is awake, she is
asleep. Where he is active, she is passive. Where she is erect, or
awake, or active, she is evil and must be destroyed.. . .
There are two definitions of woman. There is the good woman.
She is a victim. There is the bad woman. She must be destroyed.
The good woman must be possessed. The bad woman must be
killed, or punished. Both must be nullified.
. . . There is the good woman. She is the victim. The posture
of victimization, the passivity of the victim demands abuse.
Women strive for passivity, because women want to be good.
The abuse evoked by that passivity convinces women that they
are bad.. . .
Even a woman who strives conscientiously for passivity sometimes does something. That she acts at all provokes abuse. The abuse provoked by that activity convinces her that she is bad.. . .
happy ending. It does not. The moral of the story is the happy
ending. It tells us that happiness for a woman is to be passive,
victimized, destroyed, or asleep. It tells us that happiness is for
the woman who is good—inert, passive, victimized—and that a
good woman is a happy woman. It tells us that the happy ending
is when we are ended, when we live without our lives or not at
all. 4
Every organ of this male supremacist culture embodies the
complex and odious system of rewards and punishments which
will teach a woman her proper place, her allowable sphere.
Family, school, church; books, movies, television; games,
songs, toys— all teach a girl to submit and conform long before she becomes a woman.
The fact is that a girl is forced, through an effective and
pervasive system of rewards and punishments, to develop precisely the lack of qualities which will certify her as a woman.
In developing this lack of qualities, she is forced to learn to
punish herself for any violation of the rules of behavior that
apply to her gender class. Her arguments with the very definitions of womanhood are internalized so that, in the end, she argues against herself— against the validity of any impulse
toward action or assertion; against the validity of any claim to
self-respect and dignity; against the validity of any ambition to
accomplishment or excellence outside her allowable sphere.
She polices and punishes herself; but should this internal value
system break down for any reason, there is always a psychiatrist, professor, minister, lover, father, or son around to force her back into the feminine flock.
Now, you all know that other women will also act as agents
of this mammoth repression. It is the first duty of mothers
under patriarchy to cultivate heroic sons and to make their
daughters willing to accommodate themselves to what has
been accurately described as a “half-life. ” All women are supposed to vilify any peer who deviates from the accepted norm of femininity, and most do. What is remarkable is not that
most do, but that some do not.
The position of the mother, in particular, in a male
supremacist society, is absolutely untenable. Freud, in yet
another astonishing insight, asserted, “A mother is only
brought unlimited satisfaction by her relation to a son; this is
altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of
all human relationships. ”5 The fact is that it is easier for a
woman to raise a son than a daughter. First, she is rewarded
for bearing a son—this is the pinnacle of possible accomplishment for her in her life, as viewed by male culture. We might say that in bearing a son, she has had a phallus inside her
empty space for nine months, and that that assures her of
approval which she could not earn in any other way. She is
then expected to invest the rest of her life in maintaining,
nourishing, nurturing, and hallowing that son. But the fact is
that that son has a birthright to identity which she is denied.
He has a right to embody actual qualities, to develop talents,
to act, to become— to become who or what she could not
become. It is impossible to imagine that this relationship is
not saturated with ambi
valence for the mother, with ambivalence and with downright bitterness. This ambivalence, this bitterness, is intrinsic to the mother-son relationship because
the son will inevitably betray the mother by becoming a man
— that is, by accepting his birthright to power over and against
her and her kind. 6 But for a mother the project of raising a boy
is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch
him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play;
she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and
values— or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her
son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by
her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the
project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads
inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a
woman to be— to be through her son, to live through her
son.
The project of raising a girl, on the other hand, is torturous.
The mother must succeed in teaching her daughter not to be
she must force her daughter into developing the lack of qualities that will enable her to pass as female. The mother is the primary agent of male culture in the family, and she must
force her daughter to acquiesce to the demands of that culture. 7 She must do to her daughter what was done to her. The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on
means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men,
whether they are our sons or not; that we are all trained to
force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which
characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.
Fear cements this system together. Fear is the adhesive that
holds each part in its place. We learn to be afraid of the
punishment which is inevitable when we violate the code of
enforced femininity.
We learn that certain fears are in and of themselves feminine— for instance, girls are supposed to be afraid of bugs and mice. As children, we are rewarded for learning these fears.
Girls are taught to be afraid of all activities which are expressly designated as male terrain— running, climbing, playing ball; mathematics and science; composing music, earning money, providing leadership. Any list could go on and on—
because the fact is that girls are taught to be afraid of everything except domestic work and childrearing. By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element.
We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time
we do not even notice it. Instead of “I am afraid, ” we say, “I
don’t want to, ” or “I don’t know how, ” or “I can’t. ”
Fear, then, is a learned response. It is not a human instinct
which manifests itself differently in women and in men. The
whole question of instinct versus learned response in human
beings is a specious one. As Evelyn Reed says in her book,
Woman’s Evolution:
The essence of socializing the animal is to break the absolute
dictation of nature and replace purely animal instincts with conditioned responses and learned behavior. Humans today have shed their original animal instincts to such a degree that most
have vanished. A child, for example, must be taught the dangers
of fire, which animals flee instinctively. 8
We are separated from our instincts, whatever they were, by
thousands of years of patriarchal culture. What we know and
what we act on is what we have been taught. Women have
been taught fear as a function of femininity, just as men have
been taught courage as a function of masculinity.
What is fear then? What are its characteristics? What is it
about fear that is so effective in compelling women to be good
soldiers on the side of the enemy?
Fear, as women experience it, has three main characteristics: it is isolating; it is confusing; and it is debilitating.
When a woman violates a rule which spells out her proper
behavior as a female, she is singled out by men, their agents,
and their culture as a troublemaker. The rebel’s isolation is
real in that she is avoided, or ignored, or chastised, or denounced. Acceptance back into the community of men, which is the only viable and sanctioned community, is contingent on
her renunciation and repudiation of her deviant behavior.
Every girl as she is growing up experiences this form and
fact of isolation. She learns that it is an inevitable consequence of any rebellion, however small. By the time she is a woman, fear and isolation are tangled into a hard, internal
knot so that she cannot experience one without the other. The
terror which plagues women at even the thought of being
“alone” in life is directly derived from this conditioning. If
there is a form of “female perdition” under patriarchy, surely
it is this dread of isolation—a dread which develops from the
facts of the case.
Confusion, too, is an integral part of fear. It is confusing to
be punished for succeeding—for climbing a tree, or excelling
in mathematics. It is impossible to answer the question, “What
did I do wrong? ” As a result of the punishment which is inevitable when she succeeds, a girl learns to identify fear with confusion and confusion with fear. By the time she is a
woman, fear and confusion are triggered simultaneously by
the same stimuli and they cannot be separated from each other.
Fear, for women, is isolating and confusing. It is also consistently and progressively debilitating. Each act outside a woman’s allowable sphere provokes punishment— and this
punishment is as inevitable as nightfall. Each punishment inculcates fear. Like a rat, a woman will try to avoid those high-voltage electric shocks which seem to mine the maze. She too
wants the legendary Big Cheese at the end. But for her, the
maze never ends.
The debility which is intrinsic to fear as women experience
it is progressive. It increases not arithmetically as she gets
older, but geometrically. The first time a girl breaks a gender
class rule and is punished, she has only the actual consequences of her act with which to contend. That is, she is isolated, confused, and afraid. But the second time, she must coa-tend with her act, its consequences, and also with her memory
of a prior act and its prior consequences. This interplay of the
memory of pain, the anticipation of pain, and the reality of
pain in a given circumstance makes it virtually impossible for
a woman to perceive the daily indignities to which she is subjected, much less to assert herself against them or to develop and stand for values which undermine or oppose male supremacy. The effects of this cumulative, progressive, debilitating aspect of fear are mutilating, and male culture provides only one possible resolution: complete and abject submission.
This dynamic of fear, as I have described it, is the source of
what men so glibly, and happily, call “female masochism. ”
And, of course, when one’s identity is defined as a lack of
identity; when one’s survival is contingent on learning to destroy or restrain every impulse toward self-definition; when one is consistently and exclusively rewarded for hurting oneself by conforming to demeaning or degrading rules of behavior; when one is consistently and inevitably punished for accomplishing, or succeeding, or asserting; when one is battered and rammed, physically and/or emotionally, for any act or thought of rebellion, and then applauded and app
roved of
for giving in, recanting, apologizing; then masochism does
indeed become the cornerstone of one’s personality. And, as
you might already know, it is very hard for masochists to find
the pride, the strength, the inner freedom, the courage to organize against their oppressors.
The truth is that this masochism, which does become the
core of the female personality, is the mechanism which assures
that the system of male supremacy will continue to operate as
a whole even if parts of the system itself break down or are
reformed. For example, if the male supremacist system is reformed, so that the law requires that there be no discrimination in employment on the basis of gender and that there be equal pay for equal work, the masochistic conditioning of
women will cause us to continue, despite the change in law, to
replicate the patterns of female inferiority which consign us to
menial jobs appropriate to our gender class. This dynamic
insures that no series of economic or legal reforms will end
male domination. The internal mechanism of female masochism must be rooted out from the inside before women will ever know what it is to be free.
(2 )
Now, the feminist project is to end male domination— to obliterate it from the face of this earth. We also want to end those forms of social injustice which derive from the patriarchal model of male dominance— that is, imperialism, colonialism, racism, war, poverty, violence in every form.
In order to do this, we will have to destroy the structure of
culture as we know it, its art, its churches, its laws; its nuclear
families based on father-right and nation-states; all of the
images, institutions, customs, and habits which define women
as worthless and invisible victims.
In order to destroy the structure of patriarchal culture, we
will have to destroy male and female sexual identities as we
now know them— in other words, we will have to abandon
phallic worth and female masochism altogether as normative,
sanctioned identities, as modes of erotic behavior, as basic