Woman Hating Read Free Page A

necrophiliac’s lust —the innocent,victimizedSleeping Beauty, beauteous lump of ultimate, sleeping good. Despite ourselves, sometimes unknowing, sometimes knowing, unwilling, unable to do otherwise, we act out the roles we were taught.
    Here is the beginning, where we learn who we must be, as well as the moral of the story.
     

CHAPTER 1
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    Onceuponatime: The Roles
    Death is that remedy all singers dream of
    Allen Ginsberg
    The culture predetermines who we are, how we behave, what we are willing to know, what we are able to feel.
    We are born into a sex role which is determined by visible sex, or gender.
    We follow explicit scenarios of passage from birth into youth into maturity into old age, and then we die.
    In the process of adhering to sex roles, as a direct consequence of the imperatives of those roles, we commit homicide, suicide, and genocide.
    Death is our only remedy. We imagine heaven. There is no suffering there, we say. There is no sex there, we say. We mean, there is no culture there. We mean, there is no gender there. We dream that death will release us from suffering—from guilt, sex, the body. We recognize the body as the source of our suffering. We dream of a death which will mean freedom from it because here on earth, in our bodies, we are fragmented, anguished—either men or women, bound by the very fact of a particularized body to a role which is annihilating, totalitarian, which forbids us any real self-becoming or self-realization.
    Fairy tales are the primary information of the culture. They delineate the roles, interactions, and values which are available to us. They are our childhood models, and their fearful, dreadful content terrorizes us into submission — if we do not become good, then evil will destroy us; if we do not achieve the happy ending, then we will drown in the chaos. As we grow up, we forget the terror—the wicked witches and their smothering malice. We remember romantic paradigms: the heroic prince kisses Sleeping Beauty; the heroic prince searches his kingdom to find Cinderella; the heroic prince marries Snow-white. But the terror remains as the substratum of male-female relation — the terror remains, and we do not ever recover from it or cease to be motivated by it. Grown men are terrified of the wicked witch, internalized in the deepest parts of memory. Women are no less terrified, for we know that not to be passive, innocent, and helpless is to be actively evil.
    Terror, then, is our real theme.
    The Mother as a Figure of Terror
Whether “instinctive” or not, the maternal role in the sexual constitution originates in the fact that only the woman is necessarily present at birth. Only the woman has a dependable and easily identifiable connection to the child —a tie on which society can rely. This maternal feeling is the root of human community.
    George Gilder,Sexual Suicide
    Snow-white’s biological mother was a passive, good queen who sat at her window and did embroidery. She pricked her finger one day —no doubt an event in her life —and 3 drops of blood fell from it onto the snow. Somehow that led her to wish for a child “as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the embroidery frame.” 1 Soon after, she had a daughter with “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony. ” 2 Then, she died.
    A year later, the king married again. His new wife was beautiful, greedy, and proud. She was, in fact, ambitious and recognized that beauty was coin in the male realm, that beauty translated directly into power because it meant male admiration, male alliance, male devotion.
    The new queen had a magic mirror and she would ask it: “Looking-glass upon the wall, Who is fairest of us all? ” 3 And inevitably, the queen was the fairest (had there been anyone fairer we can presume that the king would have married her).
    One day the queen asked her mirror who the fairest was, and the mirror answered: “Queen, you are full