The Privatization of Women

Andrea Dworkin has stated that we, in this society, DO NOT perceive a husband (the one who fucks) and a wife (the one who is fucked) as a SOCIAL unit.  It is, in fact, a private unit.  It is not a social part of life.  The relationship between a man and his wife is not interpreted as SOCIAL.  This is what church, state, and institutional laws are built around.  Men build goddamn walls around women, like a prisoner in solitary confinement, and then call it their home.  In this home, or prison, we are beaten, manipulated, raped, annihilated.  Women are most likely to be beaten, raped, and killed in their own home than anywhere else.  

On top of this, we, literally, are given a script for how to interpret that PRIVATE unit.  It’s in the media, our movies, our TV shows, our literature, our institutions.  It’s everywhere.  The romance of the woman (or, what should be more appropriately called the rape of the woman) is the script we are given.  Pornography demonstrates this clearly: women are beaten with a smile on their faces, and it is a ejaculatory event for both this man and this woman.

More than 50% of women report that they were ATTACKED in their own home, most commonly by their “intimate” partner.  The meaning of the word “intimate” is defined as “very private; closely personal”.  Women are captives with no political rights to defend off their attacker, their abuser, the man they were socially conditioned to love NO MATTER WHAT.  She is his property through and through.  She still cannot claim that she has been raped in a court of law without being laughed away.  She, throughout history through the eyes of men, has seemed to have cried wolf.  She cannot claim dignity nor respect nor any self.  According to Wikipedia, the definition of captive is “the state of being confined to a space from which it is difficult or impossible to escape”.  A place where one finds it difficult to escape?  This is the function of marriage.  It is a literal capture.  Women are unable to leave their male partners for economic reasons, for legal reasons, for every male class law and institution in place.

Women, who only got the vote 92 years ago, haven’t been able to participate in the construction of their society.  Their voices have been drowned out, ignored, silenced. 

To demonstrate to you how sub-human women are, in 1990 it was reported that there were 1,500 shelters for battered women in the United States. There are 3,800 animal shelters.  How is this possible, when the evidence is so clear that women are beaten, tortured, killed on a daily basis?  This means there are 2.5 times more animal shelters than there are human shelters, which supposedly are supposed to function when someone is in a state of EMERGENCY.  Apparently, a man’s best friend is only his dog, not his wife.  A dog’s function is, after all, companionship, while the wife is still relegated to the function of producing the progeny of the male through contracted intercourse.

The husband is the human being in this “PRIVATE” relationship.  Not the women; it’s never the woman who is human in this gender classed world.  The woman is property, an object of possession, a fetishized sexual being that elevates the man’s prosperity.  The wife is his bling, like his car which functions to get him around.  She is, literally, a PART of him, like his pinky finger or his spleen.  (Eve, after all, is of Adam’s rib)  She is not human.  She is the one who breeds, who CARES for him.  During Colonial times, men literally BOUGHT women.  They were brought to the colonies as wives.  This is ONLY 200 years ago out of our 50,000 year history as humans.  This was how America began: bringing captives, white and black, as slaves to the WHITE MAN.  Both white women and blacks were sexual slaves.  The white woman bred the new generations of white men, while blacks were bred as slaves.  Black women were also used as the sexual property of the white man.  America was literally born through the system of concubinage.

Women are literally PRIVATE PROPERTY.  LITERALLY.  To this day, this is how the laws are set up.  It is "private matters".  It is "none of your business."  Literally, it is none of society’s BUSINESS.  It is personal, not to be discussed.  Law and State interprets it this way.  The church interprets it this way.  Our learned behavior has been conditioned this way… The relationship between a man and his wife is privatized.  Women are literally owned by the men they marry.  The laws make it so. She is owned inside out.  The slit between her legs is his property.  His sexual object, his possession, his fetishized obsession.  Remember, he signed a contract saying he is the owner of her slit.  That CONTRACT states that he has sexual access to her.  He can have sexual access to her whether she likes it or not, and he will get away with it.  Like the slaves, she is the white property of his estate, his castle.  He can intimidate her, insult her, degrade her, and get away with it.  He can beat her, hurt and rape her and get away with it, and on top of that she will be the one to blame.  It is her fault; she is crazy and has “personal issues”, the script says, society says.  I am here to say that her “personal” issues ARE NOT PERSONAL.  They ARE POLITICAL.  The only thing she is trying to do is keep herself alive, trying to keep her body, mind, and soul from being violated.  And the court says, “No, you are exaggerating, lying.”  And the psychologists say, “No, you are bipolar, crazy.”  And the intellectuals say, “No, you are not worth our time nor effort.”  And her family says, “No, you are his wife. Deal with it.”  He can kill her, like chattel, and get away with murder.  And she has died a trillion times throughout history.

This is why the statement, “The Personal is Political” is so important.  I’m glad a close professor has emphasized this phrase so much to me.  Women have been privatized.  This is why the personal lives of women are so important to listen to, not to be trivialized, not to be swept under the carpet.  Yet, this is what’s going on.  Women are being ignored; to take her seriously would cause great anger, great violence, great political conflict.  The Suffragettes knew it.  In their personal conversations with each other, they strategized NOT to talk about the personal lives they inhabited with men.  These women knew it would anger men to the point of losing the vote.  They strategized not to talk about it in order to get the vote.  This must end.  Our silence must END NOW.  We are no longer living under the same state of tyranny of the 1920s… that is to say, not as much... not much, after all, has changed.  The state has reconfigured and women have done that.  Now we must act in new ways; we must have the courage to not be afraid of what men will do to us when we speak up and institute new laws.  We must end the privatization of women, the privatization of marriage, and the privatization of masculine identity.  We must end our silence on issues of “private matters”.

Feminism’s war against their oppressors has always been about ridding the masculine identity from the face of the earth.  Women have done this through changing laws, obtaining the vote, creating women shelters and rape centers, through using their words. They have done this with their mutilated bodies up for grabs, putting their lives up for the violent backlash which pounds back 10 times harder. Feminism, I will tell you, have not raised up in arms as a collective force.  They have used merely their words, marching, protesting. 

But this is a war no matter how men try to define war; it is a war which violates the bodies of women.  Men use their propaganda, pornography, which is now so proliferate that even “women’s magazines” are filled with it, showing the bodies of hot young fuckable girls with a look of sexual seduction on their faces in stiletto heels.  Women, now more than ever, have internalized this masochistic language as the pornographic imagination has extended out past farther than even anyone imagined: into the public sphere of commercials, television, the media, the internet.

This war is no different from nations violating the human rights of other nations.  War is defined as a state of emergency, and so is the condition of women as they stand now, in 4 inch high heels.  Women are in a state of emergency, yet, when we speak up, go to the authorities, talk with our closest friends and family, we are trivialized and told we deserve it, need it.  Women need to fight back against the all holy masculine identity dependent on pillage and rape.  A precondition for joy for men is putting women in their place.  This is the function of marriage, of the dating system.  It is to put a woman in her place: as a sexual object to be bred and used for physical labor.  This must change.  Men need to find a way to break the systematic sadistic joy and literal erection they get from beating, raping, and ejaculating on women.  If they do not, we, women, will force them to; they will be forced to change, and if they do not, they will perish from this world because we will make this world into something they cannot thrive in.

I'd like to leave you with a speech given by Andrea Dworkin, who highly influenced this piece.

http://andreadworkin.com/audio/montrealdworkin.mp3