Читаем Right-wing Women полностью

People—as we are always reminded by counterfeit egalitarians—

have always died too young, too soon, too isolated, too full of insupportable anguish. But only women die one by one, whether famous or obscure, rich or poor, isolated, choked to death by the

lies tangled in their throats. Only women die one by one, attempt­

ing until the last minute to embody an ideal imposed upon them by

men who want to use them up. O nly women die one by one, smiling up to the last minute, smile of the siren, smile of the coy girl, smile of the madwoman. O nly women die one by one, polished

to perfection or unkempt behind locked doors too desperately

ashamed to cry out. O nly women die one by one, still believing

that if only they had been perfect— perfect wife, mother, or

whore— they would not have come to hate life so much, to find it

so strangely difficult and em pty, themselves so hopelessly confused

and despairing. Women die, mourning not the loss of their own

lives, but their own inexcusable inability to achieve perfection as

men define it for them. Women desperately try to embody a male-

defined feminine ideal because survival depends on it. The ideal,

by definition, turns a woman into a function, deprives her of any

individuality that is self-serving or self-created, not useful to the

male in his scheme of things. This monstrous female quest for

male-defined perfection, so intrinsically hostile to freedom and integrity, leads inevitably to bitterness, paralysis, or death, but like the mirage in the desert, the life-giving oasis that is not there, survival is promised in this conformity and nowhere else.

Like the chameleon, the woman must blend into her environment, never calling attention to the qualities that distinguish her, because to do so would be to attract the predator’s deadly attention. She is, in fact, hunted meat— all the male auteurs, scientists, and homespun philosophers on street corners will say so proudly.

Attempting to strike a bargain, the woman says: I come to you on

your own terms. Her hope is that his murderous attention will

focus on a female who conforms less artfully, less w illingly. In

effect, she ransoms the remains of a life— what is left over after she

has renounced willful individuality— by promising indifference to

the fate of other women. This sexual, sociological, and spiritual

adaptation, which is, in fact, the maiming of all moral capacity, is

the prim ary imperative of survival for women who live under male-

supremacist rule.

*

. . . I gradually came to see that I would have to

stay within the survivor’s own perspective. This will

perhaps bother the historian, with his distrust of

personal evidence; but radical suffering transcends

relativity, and when one survivor’s account of an

event or circumstance is repeated in exactly the same

way by dozens of other survivors, men and women

in different camps, from different nations and cultures, then one comes to trust the validity of suchreports and even to question rare departures from

the general view . 2

Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor:

An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps

The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical

butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical

mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and the other commonplaces of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the

mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No

matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or

eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been

whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they

were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed,

threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of