The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone

Author:Shulamith Firestone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

6 Love

A book on radical feminism that did not deal with love would be a political failure. For love, perhaps even more than child-bearing, is the pivot of women’s oppression today. I realize this has frightening implications: do we want to get rid of love?

The panic felt at any threat to love is a good clue to its political significance. Another sign that love is central to any analysis of women or sex psychology is its omission from culture itself, its relegation to ‘personal life’. (And whoever heard of logic in the bedroom?) Yes, it is portrayed in novels, even metaphysics, but in them it is described, or better, re-created, not analysed. Love has never been understood, though it may have been fully experienced, and that experience communicated.

There is reason for this absence of analysis: women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture.

The tired question ‘What were women doing while men created masterpieces?’ deserves more than the obvious reply: women were barred from culture, exploited in their role of mother. Or its reverse: women had no need for paintings since they created children. Love is tied to culture in much deeper ways than that. Men were thinking, writing, and creating, because women were pouring their energy into those men; women are not creating culture because they are preoccupied with love.

That women live for love and men for work is a truism. Freud was the first to attempt to ground this dichotomy in the individual psyche: the male child, sexually rejected by the first person in his attention, his mother, ‘sublimates’ his ‘libido’ – his reservoir of sexual (life) energies – into long-term projects, in the hope of gaining love in a more generalized form; thus he displaces his need for love into a need for recognition. This process does not occur as much in the female: most women never stop seeking direct warmth and approval.

There is also much truth in the clichés that ‘behind every man there is a woman’, and that ‘women are the power behind [read: voltage in] the throne’. (Male) Culture was built on the love of women, and at their expense. Women provided the substance of those male masterpieces; and for millennia they have done the work, and suffered the costs, of one-way emotional relationships the benefits of which went to men and to the work of men. So if women are a parasitical class living off, and at the margins of, the male economy, the reverse too is true: (male) culture is parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity.

Moreover, we tend to forget that this culture is not universal, but rather sectarian, presenting only half the spectrum of experience. The very structure of culture itself, as we shall see, is saturated with the sexual polarity, as well as being in every degree run by, for, and in the interests of male society. But while the male half is termed all of culture, men have not forgotten there is a female ‘emotional’ half: they live it on the sly.

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