Institutionalized Female Powerlessness and the Child's Abandonment of their Mother.

Distemperance

It is the male who is powerful, and even the child, early on, knows it, perceives it, acts to mitigate the danger, to protect himself from it. This means making an alliance with the one who has the power, the father; and this is what all boys try to do.

To understand, or to know even without understanding, that survival demands this alliance means that the boy has passed beyond any infantile experience of the mother's power over his immediate well-being. He has experienced her powerlessness, and it is this more mature experience of female powerlessness, of the female's inability to protect the boy from the power of the adult male, that is the basis of his adult behavior.

Adult men have made their seedy pact with and for male power. They have entered the kingdom, and once there, they will not return voluntarily to the degraded world of the female. Because, as men, they can define reality without reference to truth, they turn their own experience on it's ass to justify their capitulation to the power of the father, their cowardly abandonment of their mother.

Their guilt must be very great.

In all their communication, shouted and whispered, no matter what men have done to them, they name women the threat, and the truth is that any loyalty to women does threaten a man's place in the community of men.

Anything, including memory or conscience, that pulls a man toward women as humans, not as objects and not as monsters, does endanger him. But the danger is always from other men. And no matter how afraid he is of those other men, he has taken a vow - one for all and all for one - and he will not tell.

Women are scapegoated here to, called powerful by men who know only too well how powerless women are - know it so well that they will tell any lie and commit any crime so as not to be touched by the stigma of that powerlessness.

From, "Pornography - Men Posessing Women" by Andrea Dworkin

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