178 THEORIES OF WOMEN'S SUBORDINATION
ery woman has experienced that desolation when her sister p However, most of the feminists and lesbian-feminists in America and elsewhere
crunch: heterosexuality demands that she do so. ~ as women still
se'iJII'f'Y.
they will at some
who do not receive those
Monique Wittig
A materialist feminist approach to women's oppression destroys the idea that women
are a "natural group": "a socia! group of a special kind, a group perceived as natural, a
group of men considered as materially specific in their bodies." A lesbian society de-
stroys the artificial (social) fact constituting women as a "natural group." A lesbian so-
ciety pragmatically reveals that the division from men of which women have been the
object is a political one and shows how we have been ideologically re-built into a "nat-
ural group. " In our case, ideology goes far since our bodies as well as our minds are
the product of this manipulation. We have been compelled in our bodies and in our
minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been estab-
lished for us. Distorted to such an extent that our deformed body is what they call
"natural," is what is supposed to exist as such before oppression. Distorted to such an
extent that at the end oppression seems to be a consequence of this "nature" in our-
selves (a nature which is only an idea). What a materialist analysis does by reasoning,
a lesbian society accomplishes in fact: not only is there no natural group "women" (we
lesbians are a living proof of it) but as individuals as well we question "woman,"
which for us, as for Simone de Beauvoir thirty years ago, is only a myth. She said:
'::'One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic
fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization
as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which
is described as feminine."
ONE IS NOT BORN A WOMAN 179
still believe that the basis of women's oppression is biological CIS well as historical.
Some of them even claim to find their sources in Simone de Beauvoir. The belief in
mother, right and in a "prehistory" when women would have created civilization (be-
cause of a biological predisposition), while the coarse and brutal men would have
hunted (because of a biological predisposition), does not make the biological approach
any better. It is still the same method of finding in women and men a biological expla-
nation of their division, outside of social facts. For me this could never constitute a
lesbian approach since it assumes that the basis of society or the beginning of society
lies in heterosexuality. Matriarchies are no less heterosexual than patriarchies: it's
only the sex of the oppressor that changes. Furthermore, not only is this conception
still a prisoner of the categories of sex (woman and man), but it keeps to the idea that
the capacity to give birth (biology) is what defines a woman. Although practical facts
and ways of living contradict this theory in lesbian society, there are lesbians who af-
firm that "women and men are different species or races (the words are used inter-
changeably); men are biologically inferior to women; male violence is a biological in-
evitability ... " By doing this, by admitting that there is a "natural" division between
women and men, we naturalize history, we assume that men and women have always
existed and will always exist. Not only do we naturalize history, but also consequently
we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression, making change im.:
possible. For example, instead of seeing giving birth as a forced production, we see ii
as a "natural," "biological" process, forgetting that in our societies births are planned
(demography), forgetting that we ourselves are programmed to produce children,
while this is the only social activity "short of war" that presents such a great danger of
death. Thus, as long as we will be "unable to abandon by will or impulse a lifelong
and centuries old commitment to childbearing as the female creative act," having con-
trol of the production of children will mean much more than the mere control of the
material means of this production. Women will have to abstract themselves from the
definition "woman" which is imposed upon them. -
A materialist feminist approach shows that what we take for the cause or origin of
oppression is in fact only the mark imposed by the oppressor: the "myth of woman,"
plus its material effects and manifestations in the appropriated consciousnesses and
bodies of women. Thus, the mark does not preexist oppression. Colette Guillaumin, a
French sociologist, has shown that before the socio-economical reality of black slav-
ery, the concept of race did not exist (at least not in its modem meaning: it was applied
to the lineage of families). However, now, race, exactly like sex, is taken as an "imme-
diate given," a "sensible given," "physical features." They appear as though they exist-
ed prior to reasoning, belonging to a natural order. But what we believe to be a
physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an
"imaginary formation" which reinterprets physical features through the network of re-
lationships in which they are perceived. (They are seen black, therefore they are black;
they are seen women, therefore they are women. But before being seen that way, they
first had to be made that way.) A lesbian consciousness should always remember how
"unnatural," compelling, totally oppressive, and destructive being "woman" was for us
in the old days before the women's liberation movement. It was a political obligation
and those who resisted it were accused of not being "real" women. But then we were

180 THEORIES OF WOMEN'S SUBORDINATION
,:1
l
proud of it, since in the accusation there was already something like a shadow of vic-
IJ.
tory: the avowal by the oppressor that "woman" is not something that goes without
saying, since to be one, one has to be a "real" one (what about the others?). We were
II'
also confronted by the accusation of wanting to be men, We still are by certain les-
I
m bians and feminists who believe that one has to become more and more of a woman as
II,
a political obligation, But to refuse to be a woman does not mean that one has to be-
come a man, And for her who does want to become a man: in what way is her alien-
ation different from wanting to become a woman? At least for a woman, wanting to
become a man proves that she escaped her initial programming, But even if she wants
to, she cannot become a man, For becoming a man would demand from a woman hav-
ing not only the outside appearance of a man but his consciousness as well, that is, the
consciousness of one who disposes by right of at least two natural "slaves" during his
life span, This is impossible since precisely one feature of lesbian oppression consists
of making women out of reach for us, since women belong to men. Thus a lesbian has
to be something else, not-woman, not-man, a product of society not a product of "na-
ture," for there is no "nature" in society,
The refusal to become heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a
woman, consciously or not. For a lesbian this goes further than the refusal of the role
"woman." It is the refusal of the economic, ideological and political power of a man,
This, we lesbians, and non-lesbians as well, have experienced before the beginning of
the lesbian and feminist movement. However, as Andrea Dworkin emphasizes, many
lesbians recently "have increasingly tried to transform the very ideology that has en-
slaved us into a dynamic, religious, psychologically compelling celebration of female
biological potential." Thus, some avenues of the feminist and lesbian movement lead
us back to the myth of woman which was created by men especially for us, and with it
we sink back into a natural group, Thirty years ago Simone de Beauvoir destroyed the
myth of woman. Ten years ago we stood up to fight for a sexless society, Now we find
ourselves entrapped in the familiar deadlock of "woman is wonderful." Thirty years
ago Simone de Beauvoir underlined particularly the false consciousness which con-
sists of selecting among the features of the myth (that women are different from men)
those which look good and using them as a definition for women" What the concept of
"woman is wonderful" accomplishes is that it retains for defining women the best fea-
tures which oppression has granted us and it does not radically guestion the categories
"man" and "woman." It puts us in a position of fighting within the class "women" not
as the other classes do, for the disappearance of our class, but for the defense of
"woman" and its reinforcement. It leads us to develop with complacency "new" theo-
ries about our specificity: thus, we call our passivity "non-violence." The ambiguity of
the term "feminist" sums up the whole situation, What does "feminist" mean? Femi-
nist is formed with the word "femme," "woman," and means "someone who fights for
women," For many of us it means "someone who fights for women as a class and for
the disappearance of this class," For many others it means "someone who fights for
woman and her defense"-for the myth then and its reinforcement. But why was the
word "feminist" chosen? We chose to call ourselves "feminists" ten years ago, not in
order to identify ourselves with the oppressor's definition of us, but rather to affirm
that our movement had a history and to emphasize the political link with the old femi-
nist movement.
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ONE IS NOT BORN A WOMAN 181
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It is, then, this movement that we can question for its meaning of "feminism." It so
happens that feminism in the last century could never resolve its contradictions on the
subject of nature/culture, woman/society, Women started to fight for themselves as a
group a!ld rightly considered that they shared common features, But for them these
features were natural and biological rather than social. They went so far as to adopt
pseudo-Darwinist theories of evolution, They did not believe like Darwin, however,
"that women were less evolved than men, but they did believe that male and female
natures had diverged in the course of evolutionary development and that society at
large reflected this polarization. , . The failure of early feminism was that it only at-
tacked the Darwinist charge of female inferiority, while accepting the foundations of
this charge-namely, the view of woman as 'unique,''' And finally it was women
scholars-and not feminists-who scientifically destroyed this theory. But the early
feminists had failed to regard history as a dynamic process which develops from con-
flicts of interests, Furthermore, they still believed that the cause (origin) of their op-
pression lay within themselves (among black people only the Uncle Toms believed
this), And therefore feminists, after some astonishing victories, found themselves at an
impasse for lack of reasons for fighting, They upheld the illogical principle of "equali-
ty in difference," an idea now being born again, They fell back into the trap which
threatens us once again: the myth of woman,
Thus it remains historically for us to define our oppression in materialist terms, to
say that women are a class, which is to say that the category "woman," as well as
"man," is a political and economic category, not an eternal one. Our fight aims to sup-
press men as a class, not through a genocidal, but a political struggle, Once the class
"men" disappears, women as a class will disappear as well, for there are no slaves
without masters. Our first task, it seems, is to always thoroughly disassociate "women"
(the class within which we fight) and "woman," the myth. For "woman" does not exist
for us: it is only an imaginary formation, while "women" is the product of a social re-
lationship, Furthermore we have to destroy the myth within and outside ourselves.
"Woman" is not each one of us, but the political and ideological formation which
negates "women" (the product of a relation of exploitation). "Woman" is there to con-
fuse us, to hide the reality of "women." In order to become a class and to be aware of
it, we have first to kill the myth "woman" even in its most seductive aspects, , , ,
To destroy "woman" does not mean to destroy lesbianism, for a lesbian is not a
woman and does not love a woman, given that we agree with Christine Delphy that
what "makes" woman is a personal dependency on a man (as opposed to an imperson-
al dependency on a boss), Lesbian is the only concept that I know of which is beyond
the categories of sex (woman and man), because lesbian societies are not based upon
women's oppression and because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman
either economically or politically or ideologically. Furthermore, what we aim at is not
the disappearance of lesbianism, which provides the only social form that we can live
in, but the destruction of heterosexuality-the political system based on women's
oppression, which produces the body of thought of the difference between the sexes to
explain women's oppression,
Beyond or within this class consciousness, this science/experience, while in the
separateness of one's ego, do we still have to fight to exist as an autonomous entity?
There is no doubt that we have to fight for this entity, since we are left with nothing,
 182 THEORIES OF WOMEN'S SUBORDINATION
once we reject the basic determination "woman" and "man," once we have no more at-
tributes by which to identify ourselves (I am this or that). We are for the first time in
•history confronted with the necessity of existing as a person.
Sex Equality: Difference and Dominance
Catharine MacKinnon
There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one meter long nor that it is not one
meter long, and that is the standard meter in Paris.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The measure of man is man.
Pythagoras
[Men] think themselves superior to women, but they mingle that with the notion of equality be-
tween men and women. It's very odd.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Inequality because of sex defines and situates women as women. If the sexes were
equal, women would not be sexually subjected. Sexual force would be exceptional,
consent to sex could be commonly real, and sexually violated women would be be-
lieved. If the sexes were equal, women would not be economically subjected, their
desperation and marginality cultivated, their enforced dependency exploited sexually
or economically. Women would have speech, privacy, authority, respect, and more re-
sources than they have now. Rape and pornography would be recognized as violations,
and abortion would be both rare and actually guaranteed.
In the United States, it is acknowledged that the state is capitalist; it is not acknowl-
ed~ed that it is male The law of sex equality, constitutional by interpretation and
statutory by joke, erupts through this fissure, exposing the sex equality that the state
purports to guarantee.' If gender hierarchy and sexuality are reciprocally constitut-
ing-gender hierarchy providing the eroticism of sexuality and sexuality providing an
enforcement mechanism for male dominance over women-a male state would pre-
dictably not make acts of sexual dominance actionable as gender inequality. Equality
would be kept as far away from sexuality as possible. In fact, sexual force is not con-
ventionally recognized to raise issues of sex inequality, either against those who com-
mit the acts or against the state that condones them. Sexuality is regulated largely by
criminal law, occasionally by tort law, neither on grounds of equality? Reproductive
control, similarly, has been adjudicated primarily as an issue of privacy. It is as if a
vacuum boundary demarcates sexual issues on the one hand from the law of equality
SEX EQUALITY: DIFFERENCE AND DOMINANCE 183
on the other. Law, structurally, adopts the male point of view: sexuality concerns na-
ture not social arbitrariness, interpersonal relations not social distributions of power,
the sex difference not seX:discrimination .
Sex discrimination law, with mainstream moral theory, sees equality and gender as
issues Of sameness and difference. According to this approach, which has dominated
politics, law, and social perception, equality is an equivalence not a distinction, and
gender is a distinction not an equivalence. The legal mandate of equal treatment-both
a systemic norm and a specific legal doctrine-becomes a matter of treating likes alike
and unlikes unlike, while the sexes are socially defined as such by their mutual unlike-
ness. That is, gender is socially constructed as difference epistemologically, and sex
discrimination law bounds gender equality by difference doctrinally. Socially, one
tells a woman from a man by their difference from each other, but a woman is legally
recognized to be discriminated against on the basis of sex only when she can first be
said to be the same as a man. A built-in tension thus exists between this concept of
equality, which presupposes sameness, and this concept of sex, which presupposes dif-
ference. Difference defines the state's approach to sex equality epistemologically and
doctrinally. Sex equality becomes a contradiction in terms, something of an oxy-
moron. The deepest issues of sex inequality, in which the sexes are most constructed
as socially different, are either excluded at the threshold or precluded from coverage
once in. In this way, difference is inscribed on society as the meaning of gender and
written into law as the limit on sex discrimination. . . .
In [the] mainstream epistemologically liberal approach,3 the sexes are by nature
biologically different, therefore socially properly differentiated for some purposes.
Upon this natural, immutable, inherent, essential, just, and wonderful differentiation,
society and law are thought to have erected some arbitrary, irrational, confining, and
distorting distinctions. These are the inequalities the law against sex discrimination
targets. As one scholar has put it, "any prohibition against sexual classifications
must be flexible enough to accommodate two legitimate sources of distinctions on
the basis of sex: biological differences between the sexes and the prevailing hetero-
sexual ethic of American society.'" The proposed federal ERA's otherwise uncom-
promising prohibition on sex-based distinctions provides parallel exceptions for
"unique physical characteristics" and "personal privacy."s Laws or practices that ex-
press or reflect sex "stereotypes," understood as inaccurate overgeneralized attitudes
often termed "archaic" or "outmoded," are at the core of this definition of discrim-
ination6 Mistaken illusions about real differences are actionable, but any distinction
that can be accurately traced to biology or heterosexuality is not a discrimination but
a difference.
From women's point of view, gender is more an inequality of power than a differ-
entiation that is accurate or inaccurate. To women, sex is a social status based on who
is permitted to do what to whom; only derivatively is it a difference, For example, one
woman reflected on her gender: "I wish I had been born a doormat, or a man,"? Being
a doormat is definitely different from being a man. Differences between the sexes do
descriptively exist. But the fact that these are a woman's realistic options, and that
they are so limiting, calls into question the perspective that considers this distinction
a "difference," Men are not called different because they are neither doormats nor