Feminism and the mistrust it gives rise to are not the cold expression of calculations between distinct and adverse interests in bad faith. Under the guise of “justice”, “rights”, “defence” and “autonomy” it touches the world of desire. This explains the reactions of embarrassment, guilt, irony and aggressiveness beyond a proclaimed reprobation of bad boys and sadists. Feminism comes to be seen as hypocrisy, a double game, a perverse attitude. The accusation of rape concretises this threat of seeing woman taking exception to and putting an end to a game in which she was an accomplice from the start.

Through the feminist denunciation of rape, fear and the refusal of desire itself is outlined, a fear and refusal which is not usually stated openly, simply because it remains ambiguous and equivocal, but which is occasionally crudely shown up by a few extremists. Those who are caricatured or caricature themselves, scissors in hand.

Woman asks “love” to prove to her that she is not a sexual object, and to reassure her. She wants to be loved, loved for herself and not for “that” and demands feelings as an assurance. She contributes in this way to re-inforcing the sexual as something separate, instead of dissolving it in loving relationships. Tenderness and esteem only prepare for or accompany sex and even constitute a form of barter: “I can have my arse touched but not before I and my problems have been taken into consideration!”. This attitude is not simply a heritage which could be liquidated with new habits. It is also the attitude of these young “emancipated” women who put it into practice, reassuring themselves with a stream of lovers.

Anything that upsets this stratagem is a threat: not only rape and brutal sexual propositions, but also any living desire that is unexpected and clearly stated. Everything that escapes or disturbs pre-established codes is considered rape or a danger.

By turning chatting-up, sexual propositions or leers into rape, one is apparently denouncing a situation where woman is reduced to an object of consumerism. But in reality it is the very act of desiring which is being attacked. And the problem of woman is reduced to that of not being harassed; thus her desires or her — negative — reactions to the desires of others are denied.

To the chat-up we must oppose true encounter, to “voyeuristic” stares, the expression of desire and communication. The enemy is not men and their desires. The pickup is an immediate product of the city, anonymity, solitude, the destruction of the possibilities of encounter. The instigator himself uses defensive attitudes, false self-assurance and a false disdain of women.

The predatory male, and in the extreme the rapist, is a nuisance or a danger. But embarrassment or injury are above all rooted in all the misery and solitude of the victims. They are provocations, injurious responses painfully felt because they cannot fulfill, a caricature of the hope of something else. If the rapist were Tarzan, perhaps he would be forgiven. But the kerb crawler rarely has the appearance or the manners of a Prince Charming. His “prey” sees her own misery reflected in his.

Rape as an act, but more frequently as fantasy, is the product of the form of relations between the sexes and the contradictions therein. It is the politicisation of an old, more or less obsessional female fear, a fear which covers a desire for sexuality which cannot acknowledge or assert itself

Rape fantasies and dreams about housebreaking express sexual fear clothed in the fear of aggression. But this isn’t only fear, just as it is not only passivity; fantasy is also an action. Desire takes form by discharging responsibility and blame on to the aggressor. In his way the latter embodies desire itself. He is desire, but coming in from the outside. Just as the active male fantasy, and even rape itself, are products of impotence, the passive fantasy in woman is also an expression of her need for action; she acts out her desire and so deals with the reality which refuses her this right.

In the active fantasy, the desire for and refusal of the other find an outlet in domination and aggression. It is as much a question of self-defence as it is of attack, self-protection from the risk and anguish of refusal by the other with an attitude which makes neither acceptation or refusal possible. Desires, fantasies and various forms of sado-masochistic behaviour are not the product of a primary attitude which has been superficially glossed over by civilisation, and is tending to re­-emerge. The image of the pre-historic woman as a prey pulled along by the hair and who, one suspects, enjoys it. No, they are the product of man’s liberation from his real needs, which then come back to haunt him in a distorted form. Abandon, the submission which a loving relationship implies, unaccepted because it is in contradiction with a whole way of life, returns in the form of an exterior domination that is violent, imposed, feared and desired at the same time.

The Story of 0 was openly presented by its author as the dream of an emancipated woman. The success it met with and the disturbance it caused are far more an expression of this modem state of affairs where passion must be released and character armour shattered, than of an innate archaic need to suffer and submit along with the complimentary desire to dominate and torture, whether in dreams or at the cinema.

Susan Brownmiller, in her book Against Our Will, doubts that it was a woman who wrote The Story of 0 and is annoyed with the complacency of certain authors, even female ones like Anaïs Nin in her diary. Rape is carried out “against our will”, and women should be cleansed of all suspicion. All this female masochism, these aspirations for rape, are just inventions.

Yet masochistic fantasies and fantasies of rape still flourish, although with embarrassment, within the bosom of the feminist movement.

The feminist magazine ‘Emma” dedicated one of its issues to the question “Our masochistic sexual fantasies”: “This documentation on masochism and sexual fantasy has taken up our editorial group for weeks. The greatest surprise for us was the great number of women who have such fantasies. As soon as we began to talk about it, we discovered that some of the women among us were also concerned. They only dared outline their fantasies in a very hesitant way. Each was afraid of being judged by someone who did not have any”. (“Emma”, September 9, 1977).

The editorial group quote studies carried out in the United States, which demonstrate the frequency of masochistic fantasies: “... the psychologist Barbara Hariton, who gained promotion on the strength of it... found that 65 per cent of the women questioned by her had “erotic fantasies” during sexual intercourse with their partners (men or women). Thoughts of another man (or woman) were most prevalent, then visions of rape, and in third place fantasies about “perversions”. Very frequently women also imagined sexual intercourse with more than one man at the same time or voyeuristic situations where they were observed or were watching others”.

The American journalist Nancy Friday analysed a few thousand women’s letters. She found that the majority of women’s sexual fantasies “are of a masochistic nature”.

Robin Morgan, who wrote a book on the subject, says that during a meeting on sexuality attended by a group of 80 feminists, one of the participants admitted: “… it’s strange… we are feminists, but... I sometimes have sexual fantasies which in some ways are masochistic, and... I wonder if any­one here has already had the same sort of experience. Perhaps they could raise a hand”. She fled from the room. A deathly silence followed. Then, very slowly, each woman, one after the other, raised her hand.

Robin Morgan, who herself has such fantasies, tries to change the nature of them, to dream herself the dominator, to imagine herself the sultan, professor, rapist, but that only works if she thinks of people of her own sex. Hence the hypothesis that: “... I could raise myself above them, but never above a man”. But: “That would be an unworthy understanding of myself […]. I forced myself not to have any more fantasies, upon which my capacity to have orgasms decreased, which all things considered was even more depressing. I capitulated when I became afraid of becoming frigid, and felt like an alcoholic who goes back to the bottle”. (Quoted in “Emma”).

All this is extremely disconcerting. How can these fantasies, which are sometimes the only way to reach orgasm, be condemned without appreciating that “they are to be found in strong opposition to the dignity for which women are struggling today”? (“Emma”) In despair Robin Morgan explains that ever since men have reversed matriarchy through trickery, all this has had time to be registered in her cells. “Emma” reaches the following conclusions:

1) Our fantasies are the product of social conditions. They reflect the submission of woman in a male dominated society.

2. Fantasies say nothing about what is really desired. The contrary can be the case. When a woman finds pleasure in imagining herself being raped that in no way means she really desires to be raped.

It is more a case for diminishing women’s responsibility than explanation. The fantasies are only reflections. Women are imagined to be so malleable, poor dears! And they even go along with it. Fantasy is obviously linked to social reality, but is an active means of compensation.

A woman who dreams of being raped has every chance of being disappointed, disillusioned, by real rape, firstly because one is rarely raped by the man of one’s dreams, even if he is an anonymous figure. Nevertheless, it is not possible to dissociate and oppose fantasy and real desire in such a way. And what is expressed in fantasy will also certainly have an echo in actual behaviour.

In order for woman to be exonerated, she is lent a mon­strous alienation and is presented as a passive receptacle of images. An absolute dissociation between dream and real behaviour is pictured. In misery one sees only misery and opposes it with a struggle for dignity. If one places oneself on the terrain of dignity, it must be very difficult not to despise those who in private find pleasure in this way, and in public demonstrate a saintly fury against rapists.

These phantasms are a heritage of the millenarian oppression of women. Is there not, rather, a link between this feminism and these fantasies? Are the feminists not also dead against rapists because they dream of rape and sadism? Everything is thrown in together in a dissociated way, and opposing elements prop each other up, even if one is the overthrow of the other.

In the United States an artist has started a course in masturbation for women and has relaunched herself in the selling of suitable instruments. All the same, the pupils still seem to have a need for some theatricals and their fantasies predominantly take the form of rape. The social relationship evacuated at the practical level returns to be set up as imagination, and precisely in the form of law-breaking.

Masturbation is in fashion. It is another liberty to be conquered. Mrs Shere Hite had a best seller in the USA with her book The Hite Report. It is the result of an inquiry which in some ways is a summary of female sexual poverty and her own intellectual frigidity. Her discovery is that masturbation is the key which allows female sexuality to be understood like male sexuality. She starts from the fact that many women do not have orgasms through vaginal penetration but reach it through clitoral masturbation. Moreover coitus does not seem so great as: “the fact is that it is not realistic to expect a man to ensure total pleasure for his partner at the same time as himself”. (Interview in “Reader’s Digest Selection”, July 1977.)

From this follows some practical conclusions that a woman should know in order to avoid letting herself be intimidated or forced to have sexual relations. If a man has an erection, “nothing in nature, no physical force makes him have this orgasm inside a vagina. The stimulation he feels is coupled with the desire for orgasm and not for sexual relations as such”. Masturbation can do him as much good and even: “there is no imperative reason for him to have an orgasm at all”. (Hite Report). Thus the woman would be no more than a wanking machine for the man. The problem becomes knowing whether she wants to put him to the same use or not.

Along the same lines, but in the “futurology” section, another American philanthropist has proposed that the female population be radically reduced in relation to the male population starting from the moment when the sex of the foetus can be determined. Everything will be sorted out thanks to the supply of ersatz women. Fucking machines will replace pin-ball machines. But why such a barbarous and tortuous solution? To solve the population explosion. Tilt!

Obviously we have nothing against masturbation and the various ways of reaching orgasms which do not involve classic coitus, whether they bring the fingers, the tongue or the ears into play. But what Hite and her French counterpart Cabu, “ecology” tendency, question is the sexual union itself: “Let’s stop fucking like primitive people, coitus is out of date”. Hite wants to deliver us from this “cultural definition” and Cabu from social conditioning. And they go so far as to speak of humiliation and defilement. It would be interesting to know the results of her erotica-ecological research for “just as inti­mate approaches”, but ones which are clean.

Misery becomes arrogant and pedantic and does not hesitate to take a liberatory tone even though it is not very good at disguising itself.

The church, society, tradition, present complete coitus as the normal official form of sexual activity. First let us say there is often a gap between the norm and reality as it is lived. Masturbation, coitus interruptus and sodomy have all played an important role, primarily for reasons of contraception.

But isn’t contemporary social conditioning leading to an essentially masturbatory sexuality, without actually seeming to? Hence the difference between the classic mode of sexual relations and practical aspirations and behaviour.

First, there is the simple fact that adolescents generally experience sexuality through masturbation and that sometimes this is the only form, or the habitual form their sexual activity takes for a long time. Access to sexual relations comes far later than sexual impulses. For reasons of their living situation, fear of pregnancy, inhibition, adolescents cannot have a satisfying sexual life at a time when sexual tension is often at its strongest. Petting or masturbation substitutes coitus. The prodigious career of the Hollywood kiss finds its explanation in this contradictory situation which combines a mixture of prudishness and eroticism. Thanks to contraception, amongst other things, this situation has begun to thaw. This is where the feminists and ecologists come in again. Masturbation is not an apprenticeship to sexual union. The physical contact and means of excitation used are not the same and so they prevent sexual development.

Hite says that a large number of American women (82 per cent of those questioned) masturbate. No doubt men aren’t far behind. So masturbation is not only a memory of adolescent practice, but is also present in adult behaviour. The problem isn’t that people wank as well as screw. The masturbatory character of sexuality is manifest — and there is poverty in the sexual relationship itself.

Sexual union becomes the means of a quick and effective sleep-inducing release. In order to make it work better and reach orgasm, one tunes into one’s repertory of fantasies and screens one’s lover out.

This attitude is masturbatory because it is the fantasy that becomes the source of excitation. It is a matter of a refusal, at the psychic level and even at the physical one, where it also becomes an impossibility to abandon oneself to one’s partner and one’s own sensations. The other is used for masturbation. The consumerism of the sexual spectacle comes from the same sort of thing.

It is not surprising that many women, because of their own blocks or their partners’ behaviour, have no vaginal sensitivity or pleasure from penetration. It is prevalent for women to ignore the existence and use of the vaginal sphincter. The Americans, Masters and Johnson who demonstrated that orgasm, even through penetration, was the result of indirect stimulation of the clitoris, base an anti-frigidity therapy on the contraction of this sphincter.

It would be mistaken to see sexual difficulties as a purely physiological question which would respond to adequate exercise. And orgasm in itself is not the solution which will sort everything out, be it only because there are orgasms and orgasms. What we are up against is the way the body, through impotence or absence of orgasm in screwing, registers and fixates misery. But the reformists, seeing this misery as a natural phenomenon, jump up saying we must pass over “prejudice” and come to terms with it: solitary or reciprocal masturbation is a short cut to pleasure, a remedy for impotence.

For Hite & Co., sexual relations are reduced to helping each other towards pleasure, to rendering each other a service, naturally blending the sauce with the indispensable tenderness. Reciprocal masturbation would be the ideal. What escapes ­them is the possibility of self-abandonment in the other, a uniting of prick and cunt mixed in the same pleasure.

The way this society investigates private life allows the devastation produced by it to be isolated and its causes to be mystified. “Science” offers remedies to the catastrophes so revealed, but its outlook carries with it the very dissociations which are at the base of this catastrophe. What we can discover is the depth of the social fracture and how far it penetrates people’s intimacy.

If it is just a matter of the intensity of pleasure, then there can be no doubt that the electronic feeling and sucking machine will win out over masturbation nine times out often. If there isn’t a short circuit. If the users don’t give up. If it doesn’t make them howl with despair as it supplies them with its atrocious and inhuman pleasure. The question is not that of pleasure as such but of encounter, recognition, the union of desires and bodies, and of the harmony, pleasure and ecstasy which follows. Happiness, sexual satisfaction, is not just a matter of pleasure but also of the direction which that pleasure takes. In any case the intensity of pleasure doesn’t boil down to mechanical friction.

It is in no way surprising that the Don Juans, the machos and prickteasers prefer to wank; their behaviour is dissociated: on the one hand the social relationship is reduced to conquest i.e. to narcissistic reassurance and on the other to the satisfaction of needs.

The reverse of sexual freedom is revealed: dissatisfaction and disillusionment. The more sexuality is set free, the more it is seized on by a world of relationships of strength and competition. To fuck someone is to take advantage of them, to exercise power over them — hence the defensive reactions notably on the part of women who appear most vulnerable. But such defensiveness and fragility exist perhaps even more deeply in men for whom sexuality is valued as affirmation of self, and where aggressive and defensive sexual mechanisms overlap. But all this also demonstrates a need and a basis for a different kind of relationship.

What the ideologists of the right to orgasms and equality in pleasure fail to grasp is the complimentarity and union of the sexes. They don’t even know that that’s what it’s made for. So, unaware of its use, nothing seems to irritate them more than a phallus. Here it’s a matter of La Petite difference et ses grandes consequences (Alice Schwarzer). B Groult in .4insi Soit-elle (So be she) simply sees the differences between the sexes as no more than a question of a tap.

It was around this difference that Freud saw fear of castration in boys and penis envy in girls; being reduced to a simple possession of a prick, this difference is minimised or devalued by the feminists: it is insignificant and is only a question of a tap. It matters little whether the difference is great or small, it exists. But above all just to see a difference is to be content with comparisons. Woman is reduced to a man without a... denying her identity and the form of her desires and being in a way more denigratary than Freud’s “phallocratism”.

A prick doesn’t separate a man from a woman, it’s what allows him to unite himself with her. To see a prick as nothing but a tap is to deny it as a symbol of desire, above all as desire in the flesh and in deed. When talking of female attractiveness, do we have to say that what distinguishes a woman from a man is a hole and bumps? Such miserable plumbing and coach-building! The legal-political vision which only sees differences and wants equality to reign goes together with a castrating vision which ignores and refuses the world of desire. They put individuals side by side, never together.

The cult of the phallus must be abolished. But where is this cult of the phallus to be seen? Just as society practises a publicity cult of the female body, so the poor phallus is left in the shade. The erection becomes shameful, but not for want of putting the arse if not in a place of honour, at least on the wall. Let us remind leftist moralists that the female body is exhibited and reduced to an object of consumerism not to stimulate erections but to sell goods.

The psychoanalysts very much in fashion today have revealed to us the phallic character of the insignia of authority: sceptres, batons of command... But the phallus is not accepted and respected because it is maliciously masked. It’s not simply a game of prudish hide and seek: it is denied and its meaning is inverted. The desire for power is not the same as the power of desire. Let’s oppose phallocracy, yes, but because we are against power and for the phallus.

The contradiction in feminism

Feminism feeds off the resistance that the capitalist movement for the equality of women produces. That of the husband who doesn’t see why he should give a hand with the housework when he gets home from work. That of the woman who clings to a role and an image of femininity which is less and less tenable. That of businesses which prefer to engage cheap labour... In fact it is easy for it to draw up a list of cases where women find themselves in inferior situations as regards wages, domestic circumstances, etc. — where they are the ones receiving the blows. But feminism doesn’t just feed off this resistance, it is itself resistance. It is so precisely at the point where it imagines itself to be avant-garde, subversive, as its real aim is legal and practical equality.

Alongside and running through the practical demands against discrimination which logically tend to liquidate the particular image and status of women, there is a will in feminism to self-affirmation and recognition of women as women. In other words to protect or restore women’s status which is crumbling because capital is undermining its foundations and because everybody is making room for themselves by elbowing someone else. Feminists are demanding the consideration due to women (“respect us as women”), for the innocence which is to be attributed to them. They count on indul­gence towards women and their contradictions, and are annoyed when they don’t get it.

Why this double attitude? Because on the level of the struggle for equality, which is also that of the most ruthless competition, woman usually finds herself in a position of inferiority, vulnerable at work, in the street, in her sexual relations. This inferiority is due to her education which is addressed less to the struggle than to the fact that until Moulinex “liberate women” by bringing out hatcheries for foetuses she will continue to exercise a maternal function. An inferiority which arises out of her own nature and needs. It is not so much racism or an anti-woman ideology as practical conditions which are hard for the egalitarian ideology, State action or female charm to compensate for. But feminism, unable to go beyond this to a point where woman will not be limited to denying herself so as to “earn her living and her independence”, works on two levels and confuses two contradictory discourses. It also plunges into dishonesty. A male chauvinist conspiracy is used to explain why, despite judicial proclamations and modifications, women remain trapped. It is this being trapped that feminism expresses, an immense malaise which appears to have no way out and can only express itself through defensive attitudes that are sometimes vicious and delirious, rarely justifiable.

It is all very well for feminism to denounce male authority. It must, in fact, call on justice and the State if it wants to be effective. The State is the arm of the weak. It alone can seem capable of ensuring respect for those who are not able to make themselves respected. For example, the idea of wages for housework could only come about through State intervention. It is the same for more or less everything concerning the defence of women. The militantism which organises abortions, shelters battered women and supports unmarried mothers is only a solution by proxy, by “red” nuns. It is, while defending oneself, a re-enforcement of State intervention in private life. A glimpse at the Soviet Union is instructive. It was there that Amalrik, arrested by the KGB, got to know the “alcoholics” whose wives had denounced them. lt was there that a woman was sentenced for passing on syphilis to two married men.

Feminism proves to be incapable of understanding the evolution of the female situation and women’s misery. By reducing the male situation to a question of power and aiming to oppose men with women, it becomes incapable of making a true critique of male behaviour.

The more it wants to make the capacity to live, feel and have a good time a female prerogative, the more its language smells of lies. This intellectualoid and insipid waffle hopes to evoke marvelous understanding, indescribable female sensations. The past is regurgitated and sets to war against abstractions, seeking allies in the palpitations of the body, daisy chains, the earth-mother image, and modernist and psychoanalytic stereotypes at the precise moment that it has no more to say that is concrete. An incapacity to feel, love and communicate plays with vagueness and concepts at the same time, hoping to bring about change by passing off an empty package as lavish illusions.

In this way woman does nothing but make the most of, appropriate herself of, the ghetto where she is confined in impotence, feelings, intuition and “human relations”.

In a more active and aggressive way the taste for power, violence and politics that would characterise males and is postured as the cause of all ills is given free rein through feminist waffle. Waffle which believes it is protecting itself from criticism in this way but which reveals its essence: jealousy and competition with men, or rather a caricaturised image of men.

Can feminism be reduced to “move along and make room for me”? Perhaps it can for those Italian women who want 50 per cent of jobs to be assured to women. But at another level, feminism as resistance to the movement of capital is also claiming what it denounces. In its way and through its inverted language it does no more than turn around and take up the complaint of those who say that there are no longer any “real” men. The enemy is patriarchal society, male authoritarianism. But where is this authoritarian male, this master of the house who keeps wife and children under his thumb?

The peasant family of yesteryear, where a man could exercise his physical strength and his primary role in production to establish his authority and direct the family, has practically dissolved even in rural districts. Wage labour has made the man a “bread-winner” expelling both himself and his productive activity from the sphere of the family. The proletarian brings home money, but he is not the dominant figure even inside his own family. His children do not see him toiling for the family subsistence before their very eyes as was the case for peasant families.

There has been a profound change in family relations and in the nature of paternal and marital authority. There is economic dependence on the father, but his authority appears ancillary and does not arise directly from his function. As a proletarian he is subjected to authority in his activity; he may have fits of despotism when he comes home, but he can no longer seriously pass himself off as the master, which he fundamentally is not. He is not at home in the factory, is he even in the home? In the popular milieux it is frequently the woman who manages the household expenses, giving back the man his pocket money. It is a well known fact that 80 per cent of household purchases are made by women. Housework has been compared to serfdom and in fact the wage relation has had to rely on this submerged activity. But to say that woman is the servant of men is just as true and just as false as to say that she is the servant of the bourgeoisie. “My boss” is the popular expression. But the man, unless he is someone is often more lost than the woman, his life and activity have less meaning than that which is left to the mother and housewife.

In bourgeois circles on the contrary, he has remained the master in the house as in the social field. Roman law was reintegrated establishing the man’s place as the head of the household over the woman and young minors. So women and children find themselves far more restricted to a dependent role than in the popular strata. Inheritances have to be waited for. Today the young bourgeois rebel against daddy, sometimes even confusing proletarian revolution with the liquidation of their Oedipus complex. Note, however, and the Editions des Femmes know something about it, that the possession of great fortunes often comes back to women. Thus, according to “l’Expansion”, the two wealthiest people in France are women: a widow and a single woman...

There is a general contradiction between reality as it is lived, and what persists as the official figure of authority and strength as the ideal to be attained: bishops, generals, foremen, astronauts and heads of State are usually men.

Educational needs and parental influence in the family are increasingly fulfilled by women. This reality is carried over into the school itself. The father generally remains the figure of authority to whom recourse is made and who, when the occasion arises, dispenses of punishment and reprimands. But even here he can be perceived as an outsider, the instrument of a power that is not his own — i.e. that of the mother who uses the threat to keep the children in hand, and who then makes him act it out.

This transformation is accompanied by a transformation in the nature of authority itself. Women and rebellious youth, along with those who take up their struggle, wage war against authority and he who incarnates it in the family. And they certainly have good reason to fight against the suffocation and constraints of the family. But in their search for a culprit aren’t they magically trying to believe in an authority whose suppression would solve everything, and which they simply lack?

The problem of the world and its dehumanisation is not just a problem of authority. It is that of the existence of a whole host of constraints which we are continually running up against. These constraints do not suddenly appear as a part or consequence of our activity, but actually prevent us from acting or even trying to. Not all of these constraints are embodied in the human form — i.e. our movements are shackled, but these shackles emerge neither as a product of a hu­man will nor are they justified by one. There is no authority to which one can either submit or oppose oneself. All that begins from a very young age. Parents who show themselves to be incapable of coping and constituting a reassuring reference point give meaning to the renunciations the child must continually make and at the same time rob them of their rebellion. Love and hate become entangled. Destructive and vindictive behaviour takes over from authority and the legitimised discipline of times gone by. So the urbanised children of today, with the benefits of school and psychotherapy, find themselves far more restrained in taste and movement than in the past. But then there is always Santa’s Grotto in the High Street shops and the new teaching methods!

Little boys get no better deals than little girls. They are inhibited simultaneously in their need for movement and exuberance and more harshly repressed at the emotional level. They are reduced to nothing, yet already they are being asked to prove to themselves and others that they are something.

All this engenders contradictory developments; on the one hand there is a rejection of authority often confined to its most artificial forms while on the other there is an unconfessed but profound search for idols to follow, paternal images to cling to, and more or less moth-eaten certitudes.

In its inverted form, this becomes: “it’s all the fault of... men, bosses...”. There is a desperate search for culprits to blame for our misery, while we are living precisely in a period in which, - and that is a sign of its revolutionary content - those “responsible” are already being liquidated, even if their position is still being argued over.

Wage labour has therefore taken men out of the family, but it hasn’t stopped at recentralising or decentralising them in front of the television set. Women have also been dragged into wage labour. A part of the function they once carried out is now being undertaken by paid workers. Creches are being opened. Militants just ask that there should be more of them. Others demand that their staff be mixed and that parents participate in their running. People employ their radicality where they can!

The extension of female wage-labour in its way constitutes a true liberation of woman, tearing her away from the narrow world of a life of housework, and offering her finan­cial independence. But it is a liberation of the capitalist kind. A movement which does not at all abolish the inferior status of the female condition, but reproduces it in other forms.

Wage differentials have often been insisted upon. The system uses women as underpaid, underskilled labour, playing on what is still a supplementary wage, which generally means a secondary contribution to the family that is assessed in relation to the women’s domestic function. Less attention is paid to the nature of the jobs women get and their particular alienation.

The division of men and women into different sorts of paid jobs does not come about by chance. The great mass of women are used in the field of human relations (teaching, nursing, etc, or as unskilled labour, cleaners, doing assembly work, etc), in branches where capital overdevelops as it atomises the social fabric. Women abandon their role as mothers to go and look after children in creches, schools and hospitals; they abandon their role as wives to “lend a hand” as typists, secretaries and girl fridays.

So their activity is not really that of a producer, i.e. it does not consist of conceiving or making things. It is an activity that consists of taking care of people.

The peasant woman looked after her children, but through “creative” activity. Human beings develop, change, discover themselves and place themselves in relation to other people through action and the albeit fragmented modelling of the environment.

So, as capital takes charge of the whole of social life beyond that of production as such, seeing to the management of human material and developing female wage-labour in the process, a paradox emerges. Women are constrained as never before in emotional and social life which are considered separate worlds.

Feminism as we have seen is a falsified representation of a real movement that has been accomplished by capital. Its real and positive role, like that of ecology, is that it brings problems to light albeit in a disguised or inverted way. It is up to the communist movement and to theoretical quest to discover their true dimension and resolution.

The fundamental weakness is that general change and discontent are reduced to the woman’s question. The opposition between men and women is, and is becoming increasingly more so, but one instance of a general system of friction which the hierarchical structure of society is producing by playing on inequalities and oppositions that are continually being reproduced while the old norms are being liquidated. There is a general crisis of identity and a general crisis of human relations. This crisis, starting from real fixations and their distorting amplification by the media, was presented for a whole period as a generation gap, and now it is being transformed into opposition between men and women.

The depth of the proletarian movement manifests itself to the extent that women participate in it. It is when things get serious, touching deep into daily life and daily needs, that women with their scorn of the political game (apart from a few notable exceptions, from Catherine II of Russia to Margaret Thatcher), throw themselves into the fray. The women who accuse their striking husbands of irresponsibility and an incapacity to bring money home for the family in an effort to protect a certain security, or who are very docile at work, are the same women who turn round and call their husbands cowards when their radicality leaps ahead as the struggle starts to upturn the social order.

The problem for communism is not the achievement of equality between men and women. It is not a matter of democratising the couple or the family and normalising day to day relationships. It is not a matter of setting up rotas for domestic tasks or hunting down fascism in the kitchen and the bedroom.

Communism attacks the roots of the family institution. It does not dissolve the family, it is capitalism that is emptying it of all meaning and taking the education of children from it, entrusting it to specialised institutions. As communism generalises free access to goods, and amongst other things transforms and increases the space available for living in, it destroys the foundations and economic function of the family. Also, as it is the realisation of the human community, it destroys the need for a refuge within that community.

The emancipation of women and children is guaranteed as there will be no constraints on life other than mutual attraction. It is on this basis that their relationships will develop. The basis will not only be relationships of affection; people will associate to act, to move around, etc. The generalisation of the community will be such that individuals will not have to cling to this or that partner or have a fundamental fear of losing them. A mother (or father) will not have to submit to economic dependence in order to feed their children. The latter will not grow up in the smothering atmosphere of the family, they will no longer be the property of their parents to be fought over in the case of divorce. They will learn to look after themselves more easily and more quickly than they do today.

However, all relations of domination and conflict will not simply disappear because of this. But these will not be institutionalised and perpetuated within a power structure because the institutional framework and economic constraints which make this possible will have disappeared.

Capital takes account of people according to their function. It profoundly ignores the differences between the sexes therefore. In the economic and political sphere this becomes an ornament which regulates advantages and disadvantages in the promotion stakes. This is carried over outside serious social matters to become marginalised in leisure activities.

Economic necessity is a great leveller. But the difference between the sexes remains. And communism cannot dismiss it, but on the contrary will recognise it in full as it is the social expression of human needs beyond economics. Men and women have different needs and a need for this difference.

Those who see everything back to front think that education is at the root of everything, needs to be changed, and that by educating girls and boys in the same way and offering them a similar image of father and mother things will take care of themselves. An imbecilic intent to level, an incapacity to play and to enjoy the difference that brings the sexes closer together.

It is this teacher-pupil relationship with its falseness and colonialism and imposition of norms that must be liquidated, particularly because it is a matter of active, militant and progressive pedagogy. Subtle relationships need to be cultivated wherein each individual, starting from their own biological peculiarities, discovers their particular social identity, their own desire and that of the opposite sex.

Communism will not set up new rules and taboos to keep men and women in limited roles. It will not constrain people in any way and no doubt men and women will carry out similar functions, but they will not be reduced to that function and from this simple fact everyone will act their own way, which does not exclude their sexual nature. Neither will it fall back into the old division of labour.

The sexual difference is excluded from the world of work today, even though it reappears through the back door and capitalism is using it to divide, using wage differentials so as to underpay what is no more than labour. It is enough to make the partisans of equal and uniform misery rise up in anger. Communism however, which liquidates work as a separate sphere and activity, will occupy itself with reuniting the two sexes, along with children, in the same activities, but without de-sexing them.

Competitive sport offers a caricature of the capitalist universe, where the pleasure of physical effort and responding to a challenge ends up lost in the tuning of winning machines. Now that women have joined the race there is no hesitation about denaturing them by stuffing them with male hormones so that they’ll go faster. What separates communism from such repugnant practices is evident.

Extract from "On The Poverty Of Berkeley Life"
by Chris Shutes, published May 1983

The traditional feminine role concentrated, and was the single most important form of, the refuge of the individual from the ravages of history. In the family, in private life, there was, to a degree, a certain margin of choice left to individuals, semi-autonomous from the general political-economic reality. Of course, this retreat was particularly miserable for the woman, and, of course, modern feminism has attacked this form of misery directly. Yet because of the limitations of its attack - its compatability with other forms of misery - feminism has had as its most general result the effect of being the most single important mediation by which the aestheticization of daily life - its complete proletarianization - has been carried out.

The proletarianisation of women is only superficially understood as the entrance of women into traditional fields, such as the labor market. As the traditional anti-historical feminine role has broken down, the character of the proletariat has itself changed. The traditional fields are themselves no longer what they were: if you will, proletarianization has been feminized.

In "private life," the day-to-day functioning of the home is assimilated into economic jargon: e.g., “management of the household.” One hears of the "politics of housework"; “everything we do is political.” What one does with the trash implies a political decision. Serious proposals are put forward to pay housewives for their work, or at least to provide them pensions - though one can easily imagine with what success.

Psychology as a serious academic/professional discipline - as a field with credible pretensions to being a science - could only exist as long as private life could be studied as a self-contained entity. The end of the traditional feminine role, the proletarianization of women, is the end of psychology. As soon as the misery of private life becomes social—not something you hide—therapy becomes a mass commodity, as vulgar in its manifestations as different styles of shoes and equally prolific. Despite the frequent arrivist manipulation of the old psychological ideologies, the mass proliferation of therapies-for-sale has less to do with ideas than with the general recognition of the social misery of private life, and the concomitant search for individual solutions which are less demanding than a full scale attack on the objective bases of that misery. The retreat of numerous feminists into psycho-therapeutic pursuits is one of the most glaring signs of feminism’s limitations: discovering that real compensations are lost in the destruction of the feminine role, they go about creating new compensations which are supposed to be different - because non-male or anti-male - but which in fact rediscover all the old poverties and feminine specializations.

Feminism fails to conceive of consciousness itself as a social relation.

Consciousness is seen as a possession, a fixed point which requires information or data to move it up. Consciousness goes back and forth, not up.

In the matrix of social contradictions which feminism has brought to light of day can be found the raw material for numerous other ideologies, illusions and attitudes that are going to play a decisive role in the daily life of the next ten years. As in the case of feminist psychologies, it is for the most part a matter of renovating the old poverties through feminist emphases and reforms. Starting, for instance, from the widespread recognition that women have up till now been hierarchically excluded from history, a vocal if not large contingent of feminists have undertaken the search for the unknown or unheralded female celebrity of bygone days. This plays the social function of reinforcing the notion that history is something that took place in the past—it’s something you read about—while at the same time it democratizes the general identification of people with names and personalities famous. Further, it combines with the ever-present demand for the esoteric cultural novelty. On the whole, the massive proliferation of literature by and for women—emphasizing especially those qualities that women have historically been more insightful about than men, such as nuances of character—was the most notable development in the Seventies on the literary terrain. A similar trend has been marked in film.

One of the most extreme contradictions that is embodied by feminism - though it is by no means unique in this - is the tendency to judge people and actions in terms of practice, while at the same time failing to conceive of consciousness itself as a social relation. Consciousness is seen, rather, as a possession, a fixed point which requires information or data to move it up. Consciousness goes back and forth, not up; and it is precisely where feminism allows itself to petrify in the defense of the achievements already made by women, in the hierarchy, that it appears most ridiculous (such a petrification is already implied when it is acknowledged that certain people have a “higher” consciousness than others).

The tendency of feminist criteria to judge people and events on the basis of practice, as opposed to what people say about themselves, rejoins political reality on the broadest level: less and less, and only in what is quasi-universally recognized as the stupidest attitudes of Power, are ideologies judged at face value. This is most clearly concretized in the global decomposition of Communist ideology; even the Western press has been harping on the blatant contradictions of doctrinaire Communism for nigh on fifteen years (the ultra-leftists here prove they are worthy children of their epoch: they think they have discovered something when they broadcast the startling revelation that Communism is state-capitalism and, as a whole, counter-revolutionary).