Thank you for inviting me to this conference to speak about a very specific racism—the one with which I am most familiar because I have always been its object and its witness. This is a racism so old, so familiar in human history and in the history of every human being that its victims had scarcely begun to shake off its yoke, to break the silence surrounding it, twenty years ago, at a time when I was already over thirty and had reached the canonical age at which, according to Balzac, a woman no longer exists.
I feel very lonely, coming here to speak to you about this racism, if that is what it is; but if racism is a hatred of the other’s jouissance, then misogyny is the worst of all racisms.
Misogyny is the most widespread form of racism because it victimizes half of humanity, as though that half were a species within the species, a separate “race” that the entire human species can mock. A half of humanity that is at once its own victim and its own executioner, a victim subject to ridicule, so triumphant is the executioner—think of The Taming of the Shrew: a victim who inspires fear, so irrational is the hatred.
The hatred of this racism—it is not really racism and yet it is—has a woman, women, as its object. But the subject who feels that hatred can just as easily be a woman as a man.
In ancient Greece a man or a woman who hated women was described as a misogynist. The cognate term misogyne is attested in France as early as the sixteenth century; it was firmly established by the eighteenth century and was the object of a short entry in the Littré dictionary. However, unlike racism, and even though racism is a very recent formation, misogyny does not figure in contemporary dictionaries of philosophy.
In order to remove all ambiguity as to its object, women, I speak of
misogyny rather than
sexism. The latter term is a neologism modeled on
racism. As a result of the way it was used by the feminists of the 1960s, it entered the lexicon in France in 1975, defined as follows by the
Dictionnaire Quillet de la langue française: “Sexism: Masculine noun, neologism. The fact of ascribing major importance in social relations to sexuality, and especially the male libido. Term forged on the model of racism, describing the behavior of those who consider the male sex to be superior to the female (or vice versa) and take the view that it must be dominant.”
1The word
sexism is reversible in terms of its object and therefore in terms of its subject. The same reversibility is not present in the word
misogyny. Five years later we could read in the Quillet-Flammarion
Dictionnaire usuel illustré: “Sexism : Masculine noun. The dominant attitude of individuals of one sex towards the other, especially of men towards women.”
2Misogyny, then, describes the hatred of which women are the object or what Freud, in several texts, and especially Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, describes as disavowal, by both sexes, of femininity or castration; misogyny describes the discriminations that result, and they range from the disparagement of women (which goes hand in hand with their idealization) to the murder of women.
While the difference between the sexes informs every principle and system of difference and provides the model for all binary opposition systems and all dualist domination, the roots of the hatred of the other—which we mistakenly term “racism” even though the notion of “race” is very slippery—may, and this is the hypothesis I am advancing, lie in the masochistic hatred that humanity feels for half of humanity. Now, while it is true that there is no such thing as “race,” there really are two sexes. This is a reality, and it will remain irreducible and unavoidable for a long time to come. The intercrossing that some are so keen to see, and which would supposedly reduce the dissymmetry and erase its borders, would lead to the sterilization and then the extinction of the species. The human species is a sexed species, and its survival or perpetuation therefore depends on this reality and this principle: there are two sexes, and that is what fertility means.
Misogynist journalists turned the “Manifeste des 343” into the
manifeste des 343 salopes (the 343 sluts),
3 and everyone laughed. If we replaced the word
women with
Arabs, blacks, or
Jews, followed by “assholes, the lot of them,” everyone would rightly be up in arms and screaming ‘“racism” … The basis for misogyny, and this may be the reason why all fundamentalisms use it as their ultimate weapon, is not the fact that women
exist , but what women
do . It is an ability to do, or to make, that the men of the human species lack: using a male seed and a female ovum, a genitor and a genitrix, and thanks to the labor of their own flesh, body, and soul, women produce children, girls and boys who can speak and think, in a differentiated process of individuation.
Misogyny’s roots lie in envy rather than hatred and fear, in the male’s envy of women’s procreative capacity. Freud hammers home the message that we women are the slaves of our penis envy. Surely this is just a bogeyman, masking the uterus envy that so obsesses men, the envy that demands its foreclosure, and which is rooted in and erected into the surrogate phallus tree that symbolizes all power (“power comes from the barrel of the phallus,” “power comes from the barrel of a gun,” and—why not—“power comes from the barrel of a pen”).
This thought has always haunted me, and I experienced it vitally when my daughter was born; years later I found that it had been expressed in magisterial terms in the work of Melanie Klein.
4 I drew the relevant political conclusions by founding the MLF in October 1968 as a movement in which we could fight the most obscene form of that envy: misogyny. A combination of male envy and an excessive and exclusionary valuation of one sex at the expense of the other leads to the disparagement of women, on the one hand, and to their immaterial and disembodied idealization, their nonexistence, on the other. Here we find the roots of primal violence against women, their enslavement and what men call Law or the symbolic order.
How could this symbolic law recognize and condemn misogyny as a crime without putting itself outside the law, without outlawing itself and declaring itself criminal? A democratic law must account for the crime of a symbolic law that puts half of humanity outside the law. It has a duty to think it through and transcend it.
If primal repression means that woman, as mother, must be left behind and foreclosed and that everything that was once familiar must be stamped with the mark of the
un—
unheimlich, uncanny, unconscious, unknown, unknowable, unthinkable—we are indeed dealing with a misogyny that has become almost natural. And because what psychoanalysis calls “primal repression” is the precondition for the formation of the ego, in other words for the maturation of the psyche, this formative process definitively holds women back,
husteros , as genitrix (mother or hysteric), forever foreclosed from the symbolic, an unnameable thing and object of hatred and horror for men: monster, medusa, sphinx when she appears at a man’s side or before him. What is most familiar, the
heimlich, the space of conception and gestation, becomes strange, uncanny, alien,
unheimlich; what we know best becomes the unknown itself, and the prefix
un- will henceforth bar access to it: uncanny, unknown, unthinkable, unconscious, and so on.
The space where sexual, genetic, and identitarian differentiation is engendered will be the object of an absolute discrimination, of a real symbolic apartheid, or the object of repression, an egalitarian nondifferentiation.
It is because we are dealing with two types of misogyny that it is so difficult to think about the problem today. On the one hand, the advocates of motherhood go on exploiting the sexual division of labor when it comes to procreation by speculating on it and penalizing women in all their activities, in an enslaved procreation, a production of living-speaking beings that is never recognized for what it is. The irreducible dissymmetry between the sexes when it comes to procreation induces endless discrimination and endless inequalities. Everyone is familiar with that misogyny. On the other hand, by denying, to the point of paranoia, the most elementary reality principle—there are two sexes—the supporters of egalitarian universalism reduce humanity to a neutral pseudo-integration, which is therefore in fact masculine, monosexed and therefore homosexed, narcissistic, divided, sterile, and literally egoistic. An ego with no other is all that exists. There is only one God, and He is either the Father or the Son. There is only one libido, and it is phallic.
This misogyny, which is modern and progressive, is much more difficult to spot: it throws the baby out with the bathwater, and difference out with discrimination. According to its logic, any woman who wins glory, visibility, or rights hitherto reserved for men immediately becomes a man (Florence Arthaud, Edith Cresson).
5 This is the modern republic of transsexual, symbolic sons and girl-sons
(filses): madame le Premier ministre.
6It is about this hatred, then, that I am speaking, the hatred directed toward women by the sons and girl-sons of the human species who, in order to advance, flee headlong—often backward—sacrificing part of themselves as other in the name of the most perverse One.
Everywhere, always, in all places and at all times. Here, today, they are humiliating, mocking, scorning, killing, beating, raping, subjecting to incest, torturing, and killing little girls, girls, and women because they are female. They , those impersonal they , as Elie Wiesel said yesterday, are the fanatics; we have to say that they are also the misogynists.
This is such a scandal that it is scandalous to evoke it. It is so total that our democracies do not want to know about the totalitarianism that exists at the very heart of their ideals. It is global, worldwide. This is barbarism on a planetary scale. This is permanent, organized self-destruction.
In recent years feminist movements have constantly recalled that massacres and sometimes mass murders of women have been common throughout history. Witness the European witch hunts of the past, the female infanticide in China; witness the women who were buried alive in accordance with the tradition of ancient Arab tribes or the Indian women who were burned alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands and who were described as faithful wives. These are by no means phenomena from another age: female infanticide has made a comeback in China, and in certain Third World countries girls are systematically undernourished. Women are still burned alive in India when their dowries are deemed to be inadequate or are not paid on time. We also know that millions of women still suffer genital mutilation (excision, infibulation), especially in Africa, and that the same practices are widespread in Paris. The very existence of shelters for battered women and the number, finally, of rape complaints make it clear that the women of the industrialized Western countries are not spared either.
Amnesty International has published a damning report on the condition of women around the world. In both peacetime and wartime the world is a place in which women are always in mortal danger. Our century, which is so keen on denouncing all the evils that threaten humanity, and the destruction of the earth, the seas, animals, and peoples, still takes no notice of the destruction of women.
The Observatoire de la Misogynie has shown that, in France, in 1990, freedoms and equality for women were flouted at every level: economic, political, ideological, and symbolic.
7 In France, 1 woman is killed every day because she is a woman; 362 women were killed in 1990. But even before these crimes have been denounced or named, mitigating circumstances are found: the killers are said to be insane and therefore not responsible for their actions (article 64 of the penal code) or they are said to have committed crimes of passion, in which case their crimes are understandable (reduced penalties). Over four thousand women are raped every year in France (two of every three rapes are gang rapes).
Today’s Republic of Sons is, in general terms, a democratic improvement over the patriarchal Republic, but it is women who are paying the price for this sonocracy, in which the Oedipuses so often drift into a matricidal, monstricidal, priapic, and narcissistic anti-Oedipus. “Power comes from the barrel of the phallus” becomes the taggers’ “Motherfuckers.” Macho games and rituals—soccer, bullfights, wars—either exclude women or assimilate them. The “Zulu” street gangs have adopted the gang rape of blue-eyed blondes as a rite of passage and integration. And there is a real danger that a certain antiracism will give rise to a new misogyny: replace the mère (mother) in Nique Ta Mère (“Fuck Your Mother,” a rap group) with black, Jew, or pal and you’ll get the point.
Turning to the uprisings in the
banlieues,8 where unemployment and racism reign, what do we know about the multilayered suffering of immigrant women, about the exclusion and confinement of women, who are doubly invisible? We find the same silence that was forced upon the deportees who were not allowed to speak about the internment camps when they came back. The daughters of Algerian or Tunisian fathers are the social group most affected by the scourge of suicide: between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five twice as many of them commit suicide as French girls of the same age; they are five times more likely to kill themselves than their brothers.
At the economic level, a real threshold of tolerance applies to women when it comes to the right to work, despite laws on equality in the workplace. French unemployment figures attest to the discrimination: 12 percent of the active population is unemployed: 8 percent of the male population and 14 percent of the female population. Over 60 percent of the long-term unemployed are women of working age.
Women are still objects to be bought and sold, and the porn industry is expanding rapidly: underage girls are still sold into prostitution in countries where there are no laws to repress prostitution or to protect women.
Women are penalized in both economic and social terms because their triple productivity is still not recognized: the human riches that they alone produce remain invisible and unrecognized. As a result, women are still penalized even when they do the same work as men.
Women continue to suffer discrimination in terms of access to knowledge, worth, and power.
In legal terms, and despite the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which has been ratified by all the democracies and many developing countries, the UN secretary general could state in 1990 that, for women, a world of democracy or of developed countries does not exist anywhere. And although France ratified the convention in 1990, the country has introduced only timid, not to say timorous, reforms. At a time of identity crisis, the lack of any antimisogynist laws modeled on antiracist laws condemns women to the reality of death. Its existence still denied, misogyny is not recognized as a crime, as though, where women are concerned, we are afraid to punish men. The proposed reform of the criminal code speaks in general terms of the “strong” and the “weak” and of “crimes against humanity,” even though in three out of four cases the criminals are men and the victims are women. The crime remains unnamed, and therefore does not exist, just as used to be the case with rape. So long as the word is not there, the specificity of the crime can be denied. The role of the law is not simply to punish: the law names, designates, and recognizes. It wrests crimes out of silence and denial and makes it possible to speak of them: a democratic, democratizing law thus makes it possible to think.
Making a distinction between the sexes and giving women access to a law of their own is not only a way of fighting discrimination; it is a way of promoting democratization.
In ideological and cultural terms, in the era of visibility, of names and fame and “golden boys” in the media, women are absent, anonymous, invisible, silent, or dead to the world, everywhere from Bari and Mantes to Algiers. Either that, or the old images of the whore and the Madonna resurface, together with classic femininity.
At the symbolic level, the preamble to the Constitution still makes no mention of sex, a category that Amnesty International enshrined in its statutes this year alongside race, religion, and creed. The constitutional framework, remaining reticent, paralyzes the law and inhibits the urgent need for democratization, inhibits political action.
In political terms, the Constitutional Council’s rejection of quotas for women in 1992,
9 which was justified on the grounds of a hypocritical equality, is one of the reasons for the political underrepresentation of women and for the breaks in women’s careers.
The scourge of humanity known as misogyny, defined as the hatred of the other, can now be analyzed on four levels:
—The endemic, day-to-day, or banal level: 99 percent of men are unconsciously misogynist.
—Misogyny is the typical attitude of self-proclaimed good-natured male chauvinists who make smutty jokes; however, such incidental pronouncements have far-reaching political and symbolic implications and are related, sometimes by just one man, to collective beliefs: the pope has compared abortion to Nazism.
—Misogyny is contagious; it is passed on from individuals to groups and incites hatred.
—Misogyny can at any moment manifest itself at the state level if women’s right to have their own rights is challenged, if women are denied “inalienable and sacred” citizenship in their own right, or if they are not inscribed in the Constitution.
The women and men who denounce this scandal appear scandalous themselves; those who attack this irrational hatred are described as madmen and madwomen; those who fight for the elementary rights known as the rights of women are shamed and described as extremists.
It is time for us to begin to stop destroying one another. It is our duty as democrats to fight misogyny.