woman cannot be understood in terms either o f suffering or
constriction (lack o f freedom). Her artifice, for instance, may
appear to signal fear, as if the hidden dynamic is her
recognition that she will be punished if she does not conform.
But ask her. She uses the words o f agency: I want to. Artifice,
in fact, is the flag that signals pride in her nation, the nation o f
wom en, a chosen nationalism, a chosen role, a chosen
femaleness, a chosen relationship to sexuality, or sexualities,
per se; and the final configuration— the w ay she appears— is
rooted neither in biological givens nor in a social reality o f
oppression; she freely picks her signs creating a sexual-
political discourse in which she is an active agent o f her own
meaning. I do not feel— and I speak personally here— that we
need dignify, or, more to the point, treat respectfully on any
level those self-proclaimed rebels who in fact wallow in male
domination, pointing it out at every turn, as if we should turn
our attention to the very men they despise— and what? Do
something. Good God, do what? I do not feel that the marginal
types that use this overblown rhetoric are entitled to valorization. They are certainly not women in the same sense we
are— free-willed women making free choices. If they present
themselves as animals in cages, I am prepared to treat them as
such. We are not, as they say, middle-class, protecting the
status quo. It is not, as they maintain, middle-class to
appreciate the middle way, the normal, the ordinary, while
espousing a theoretically radical politics, left-wing and solidly
socialist. It is not middle-class to engage in intellectual
discourse that is not premised on the urgency o f destroying
western civilization, though certainly we critique it, nor is it
middle-class to have a job. It is not repugnance that tur^s me
away from these marginal types, these loud, chanting,
marching creatures who do not— and here I jest— footnote
their picket signs, these really rather inarticulate creatures who
fall o ff the edge o f the civilized world into a chaotic politics o f
man-hating and recrimination. Indeed, the sick-unto-death
are hard to placate, and I would not condescend to try.
W omen’s biography seeks to rescue from obscurity women
who did not belong there in the first place, women o f
achievement made invisible by an unjust, androcentric
double standard. These are noble women, not in the class
sense, because we do valorize the working class, though o f
course often these women are upper-class, and not in the
moralistic sense, although o f course they often are pure in the
sense o f emblematic. But certainly one need not labor to describe
the muck or the person indistinguishable from it. We affirm
sexually active women, yes. We will not explicate either the
condition or the lives o f sexually annihilated women— they
achieved nothing that requires our attention. The crime o f rape is
not an issue o f sex. It is an issue o f power. To recast it once again,
in a revisionist frenzy, as an issue o f freedom is painfully and
needlessly diversionary. O f course, there is a tradition in
existentialist philosophy o f seeing rape as an expression o f
freedom, a phenomenon o f freedom incarnate as it were, for the
rapist o f course, presumed male, presumed the normative
human. But certainly by now the psychological resonances o f
rape for the raped can best be dealt with in a therapeutic forum so
that the individual’s appreciation o f sex will not be distorted or
diminished— a frequent consequence o f rape that is a real
tragedy. The mechanics o f the two, rape and intercourse, have
an apparent likeness, which is unfortunate and no doubt
confusing for those insufficiently sex-positive. One is the other,
exaggerated, although, o f course, we do not know —pace St.
Augustine— which came first. St. Augustine contends that there
was sexual intercourse in the Garden but without lust, which he
saw as debilitating once he stopped indulging in it. O f course, we
all get older. The philosophical problem is one o f will. Is will
gendered? Clearly Nietzsche’s comprehension o f will never took
into account that he could be raped. Sade postulated that a
woman had a strong will— to be raped and otherwise hurt. It is
the governing pornographic conceit, indistinguishable from a
will to have sex. The problem o f female freedom is the problem
o f female will. Can a woman have freedom o f will if her will
exists outside the whole rape system: if she will not be raped or
potentially raped or, to cover Sade’s odd women, if she will not
rape. Assuming that the rapist qua rapist imposes his will, can
any woman be free abjuring rape, her will repudiating it, or is
any such will vestigial, utterly useless on the plane o f human
reality. Rape is, in that sense, more like housework than it is
like intercourse. He wants the house clean. She does not want
to clean it. Heterosexual imperatives demand that she bend her
will to his. There is, o f course, a sociology to housework
while there is only a pathology to rape. I am dignifying the
opposition here considerably by discussing the question o f
rape at all. Housework, as I showed above, has more to do
with wom en’s daily, ordinary bending o f will to suit a man. I
object to tying rape to wom en’s equality, in either theory or
practice, as if rape defined wom en’s experience or determined
w om en’s status. Rape is a momentary abrogation o f choice.
At its worst, it is like being hit by a car. The politicizing o f it
creates a false consciousness, one o f victimization, and a false
complaint, as if rape is a socially sanctioned male behavior on a
continuum o f socially expressed masculinity. We need to
educate men while enhancing desire. For most men, rape is a
game played with the consent o f a knowledgeable, sophisticated partner. As a game it is singularly effective in amplifying
desire. A m plifying desire is a liberatory goal. We are stuck, in
this epoch, with literalists: the female wallowers and the
feminist Jacobins. It is, o f course, no surprise to see a schizoid
discourse synthesized into a synthetic rhetoric: “ I” the raped
becomes “ I” the Jacobin. As the Jacobins wanted to destroy all
aristocrats, the feminist Jacobins want to destroy all rapists,
which, if one considers the varieties o f heterosexual play,
might well mean all men. They leave out o f their analysis
precisely the sexual stimulation produced by rape as an idea in
the same w ay they will not acknowledge the arousing and