Do you question the why of this?

“It is because you are a girl and are to partake in the mysteries of ‘womanhood.’ You will go on till some man finds you. You will serve him and bear him children. That alone will make you happy. Should experience ever seem to say other than this, know that you have strayed from the true path: all true happiness, for you, lies upon it. Look: You have written poems, organized events, committed outrages; and you have gotten less satisfaction from it than he has. That is because you are a woman and it is your place to be less happy. (Not because I, who praise and condemn, regard you differently and have praised and condemned you less.) Believe this till you die. If you do not, you will be mocked by the world, damned by God, and will get no love.”

The reward of love given and the punishment of love withheld have been the instruments with which these very real deformities have been inflicted till now. The temptation to acquiesce again, no matter the pain, is great. And if mothers collude with fathers … well, educated slaves worked as clerks and accountants in the slave markets of the ante-bellum South. Brutalizing, psychological systems can hold the personality to shape as surely as a bamboo splint, bound with thongs about the leg of a child and left for years, will produce the desired crippled limb.

A gallery of laws once existed to ensure there was no appeal from the situation. I know a woman, up this morning, as I write, at six, to make bread for her family, who was forty years old when women finally took the right to vote. If the legal system has altered, it is only because men are convinced that the damages inflicted in childhood are much too serious to be—seriously—affected by anything so abstract as a law. And it hasn’t altered much.

“If the crippled creature really wants to limp about the edges of the playing field during the game—well, let it!” is the tone in which men have passed most sexually equalizing laws, after the incredible work of the women who formulated and fought for them.

And having been so magnanimous by day, at night men turn to view your atrophied limbs, at last undraped, your attenuated body they have pared away with the acid of their dreams, your breasts praised if they are immature, dismissed as repellent if they are long and mature, your vulva above the fleshy thighs where the pelvic blades still jut in the parchment skin, and above it all your reticent smile which says: “I have no history, no memory of injustice. You are safe. I am not even capable of rage toward something so awesome as you!”—and their cocks rise …

And perhaps next day, the same men sit and fondly remember when they last put some feisty old biddy in her place; when they last shocked some tightassed virgin; when they last got the best of some castrating bitch; and they smile and they think: “I am helping to liberate society …”—while war and environmental pollution and economic exploitation make miserable and destroy, by frightening design, among all, all the earth’s peoples!