sexual intercourse with more than one man at the same time or voyeuristic situations where they were observed or were watching others’.
The American journalist Nancy Friday analysed a few thousand women’s letters. She found that the majority of women’s sexual fantasies ‘are of a masochistic nature’.
Robin Morgan, who wrote a book on the subject, says that during a meeting on sexuality attended by a group of 80 feminists, one of the participants admitted: ‘… it’s strange .. we are feminists, but… I sometimes have sexual fantasies which in some ways are masochistic, and… I wonder if any­one here has already had the same sort of experience Per­haps they could raise a hand.’ She fled from the room. A deathly silence followed. Then, very slowly, each woman, one after the other, raised her hand.
Robin Morgan, who herself has such fantasies, tries to change the nature of them, to dream herself the dominator; to imagine herself the sultan, professor, rapist, but that only works if she thinks of people of her own sex. Hence the hy­pothesis that: ‘… I could raise myself above them, but never above a man’. But: ‘That would be an unworthy understand­ing of myself […]. I forced myself not to have any more fanta­sies, upon which my capacity to have orgasms decreased, which all things considered was even more depressing. I ca­pitulated when I became afraid of becoming frigid, and felt like an alcoholic who goes back to the bottle’. (Quoted in Emma)
All this is extremely disconcerting. How can these fanta­sies, which are sometimes the only way to reach orgasm, be condemned without appreciating that ‘they are to be found in strong opposition to the dignity for which women are strug­gling today’? (Emma) In despair Robin Morgan explains that ever since men have reversed matriarchy through trick­ery, all this has had time to be registered in her cells. Emma reaches the following conclusions:
1) Our fantasies are the product of social conditions. They reflect the submission of woman in a male dominated soci­ety.
2) Fantasies say nothing about what is really desired. The contrary can be the case. When a woman finds pleasure in imagining herself being raped that in no way means she really desires to be raped.
It is more a case for diminishing women’s responsibility than explanation. The fantasies are only reflections. Women are imagined to be so malleable, poor dears! And they even go along with it. Fantasy is obviously linked to social reality, but is an active means of compensation.
A woman who dreams of being raped has every chance of being disappointed, disillusioned, by real rape, firstly because one is rarely raped by the man of one’s dreams, even if he is an anonymous figure. Nevertheless, it is not possible to dissociate and oppose fantasy and real desire in such a way. And what is expressed in fantasy will also certainly have an echo in actual behaviour.
In order for woman to be exonerated, she is lent a monstrous alienation and is presented as a passive receptacle of images. An absolute dissociation between dream and real behaviour is pictured. In misery one sees only misery and opposes it with a struggle for dignity. If one places oneself on the terrain of dignity it must be very- difficult not to despise those who in private find pleasure in this way, and in public demonstrate a saintly fury against rapists.
These phantasms are a heritage of the millenarian oppression of women. Is there not, rather, a link between this feminism and these fantasies? Are the feminists not also dead against rapists because they dream of rape and sadism? Everything is thrown in together in a dissociated way, and opposing elements prop each other up, even if one is the overthrow of the other.
In the United States an artist has started a course in masturbation for women and has relaunched herself in the selling of suitable instruments. All the same, the pupils still seem to have a need for some theatricals and their fantasies predominantly take the form of rape. The social relationship evacuated at the practical level returns to be set up as imagination, and precisely in the form of law-breaking.
Masturbation is in fashion. It is another liberty to be conquered. Mrs Shere Hite had a best seller in the USA with her book The Hite Report. It is the result of an inquiry which in some ways is a summary of female sexual poverty and her own intellectual frigidity. Her discovery is that masturbation is the key which allows female sexuality to be understood like male sexuality. She starts from the fact that many women do not have orgasms through vaginal penetration but reach it through clitoral masturbation. Moreover coitus does not seem so great as: ‘the fact that it is not realistic to expect a man to ensure total pleasure for his partner at the same time as himself’. (interview in Reader’s Digest Selection, July, 1977).
From this follow some practical conclusions that a woman should know in order to avoid letting herself be intimidated or forced to have sexual relations. If a man has an erection, ‘nothing in nature, no physical force makes him have this orgasm inside a vagina. the stimulation he feels is coupled with the desire for orgasm and not for sexual relations, as such’. Masturbation can do him as much good and even ‘there is no imperative reason for him to have an orgasm at all.’ (Hite Report) Thus the woman would be no more than a wanking machine for the man. The problem becomes know­ing whether she wants to put him to the same use or not.
Along the same lines, but in the ‘futurology’ section, an­other American philanthropist has proposed that the female population be radically reduced in relation to the male popu­lation starting from the moment when the sex of the foetus can be determined. Everything will be sorted out thanks to the supply of ersatz women. Fucking machines will replace pin-ball machines. But why such a barbarous and tortuous solution? To solve the population explosion. Tilt!
Obviously we have nothing against masturbation and the various ways of reaching orgasms which do not involve clas­sic coitus, whether they bring the fingers, the tongue or the ears into play. But what Hite and her French counterpart Cabu, ‘ecology’ tendency, question is the sexual union itself. ‘Let’s stop fucking like primitive people, coitus is out of date’. Hite wants to deliver us from this ‘cultural definition’ and Cabu from social conditioning. And they go so far as to speak of humiliation and defilement. It would be interesting to know the results of her erotico-ecological research for ‘just as inti­mate approaches’, but ones which are clean.
Misery becomes arrogant and pedantic and does not hesi­tate to take a liberatory tone even though it is not very good at disguising itself.
The church, society, tradition, present complete coitus as the normal official form of sexual activity. First let us say there is often a gap between the norm and reality as it is lived. Masturbation, coitus interruptus and sodomy have all played an important role, primarily for reasons of contraception.
But isn’t contemporary social conditioning leading to an essentially masturbatory sexuality; without actually seeming to? Hence the difference between the classic mode of sexual relations and practical aspirations and behaviour.
First, there is the simple fact that adolescents generally experience sexuality through masturbation and that sometimes this is the only form, or the habitual form their sexual activity takes for a long time. Access to sexual relations comes far later than sexual impulses. For reasons of their living situ­ation, fear of pregnancy, inhibition, adolescents cannot have a satisfying sexual life at a time when sexual tension is often at its strongest. Petting or masturbation substitutes coitus. The prodigious career of the Hollywood kiss finds its expla­nation in this contradictory situation which combines a mix­ture of prudishness and eroticism. Thanks to contraception, amongst other things, this situation has begun to thaw. This where the feminists and ecologists come in again. Mastur­bation is not an apprenticeship to sexual union. The physical contact and means of excitation used are not the same and so they prevent sexual development.
Hite says that a large number of American women (82 per cent of those questioned) masturbate. No doubt men aren’t far behind. So masturbation is not only a memory of adoles­cent practice, but is also present in adult behaviour. The problem isn’t that people wank as well as screw. The masturba­tory character of sexuality is manifest —and there is poverty in the sexual relationship itself.
Sexual union becomes the means of a quick and effective sleep-inducing release. In order to make it work better and reach orgasm, one tunes into one’s repertory of fantasies and screens one’s lover out.
This attitude is masturbatory because it is the fantasy that becomes the source of excitation. It is a matter of a refusal, at the psychic level and even at the physical one, where it also becomes an impossibility to abandon oneself to one’s part­ner and one’s own sensations. The other is used for mastur­bation The consumerism of the sexual spectacle comes from the same sort of thing.
It is not surprising that many women, because of their own blocks or their partners’ behaviour, have no vaginal sen­sitivity or pleasure from penetration. It is prevalent for women to ignore the existence and use of the vaginal sphincter. The Americans, Masters and Johnson who demonstrated that or­gasm, even through penetration, was the result of indirect stimulation of the clitoris, base an anti-frigidity therapy on the contraction of this sphincter.
It would be mistaken to see sexual difficulties as a purely physiological question which would respond to adequate exercise. And orgasm in itself is not the solution which will sort everything out, be it only because there are orgasms and orgasms. What we are up against is the way the body, through impotence or absence of orgasm in screwing, registers and fixates misery. But the reformists, seeing this misery as a natural phenomenon, jump up saying we must pass over ‘prejudice’ and come to terms with it: solitary or reciprocal masturbation is a short cut to pleasure, a remedy for impo­tence.
For Hite & Co., sexual relations are reduced to helping each other towards pleasure, to rendering each other a service, naturally blending the sauce with the indispensable tenderness. Reciprocal masturbation would be the ideal. What escapes them is the possibility of self-abandonment in the other, a uniting of prick and cunt mixed in the same pleasure.
The way this society investigates private life allows the devastation produced by it to be isolated and its causes to be mystified. ‘Science’ offers remedies to the catastrophes so revealed, but its outlook carries with it the very dissociations which are at the base of this catastrophe. What we can dis­cover is the depth of the social fracture and how far it pen­etrates people’s intimacy.
If it is just a matter of the intensity of pleasure, then there can be no doubt that the electronic feeling and sucking ma­chine will win out over masturbation nine times out of ten. If there isn’t a short circuit. If the users don’t give up. If it doesn’t make them howl with despair as it supplies them with its atro­cious and inhuman pleasure. The question is not that of pleas­ure as such but of encounter, recognition, the union of de­sires and bodies, and of the harmony, pleasure and ecstasy which follows. Happiness, sexual satisfaction, is not just a matter of pleasure but also of the direction which that pleas­ure takes. In any case the intensity of pleasure doesn’t boil down to mechanical friction.
It is in no way surprising that the Don Juans, the machos and prick teasers prefer to wank; their behaviour is dissociated: on the one hand the social relationship is reduced to conquest i.e. to narcissistic reassurance and on the other to the satisfaction of needs.
The reverse of sexual freedom is revealed: dissatisfaction and disillusionment. The more sexuality is set free, the more it is seized on by a world of relationships of strength and competition. To fuck someone is to take advantage of them, to exercise power over them –hence the defensive reactions notably on the part of women who appear most vulnerable. But such defensiveness and fragility exist perhaps even more deeply in men for whom sexuality is valued as affirmation of self, and where aggressive and defensive sexual mechanisms overlap. But all this also demonstrates a need and a basis for a different kind of relationship.
What the ideologists of the right to orgasms and equality in pleasure fail to grasp is the complimentarity and union of the sexes. They don’t even know that that’s what it’s made for. So, unaware of its use, nothing seems to irritate them more than a phallus. Here it’s a matter of La petite diffèrence et ses grandes conséquences (Alice Schwarzer). B. Groult in Ainsi Soit-elle (So be she) simply sees the differences be­tween the sexes as no more than a question of a tap. It was around this difference that Freud saw fear of castration in boys and penis envy in girls; being reduced to a simple possession of a prick, this difference is minimised or devalued by the feminists: it is insignificant and is only a question of a tap. It matters little whether the difference is to be content with comparisons. Woman is reduced to a man without a … denying her identity and the form of her de­sires and being in a way more denigratary than Freud’s ‘phallocratism’.
A prick doesn’t separate a man from a woman, it’s what allows him to unite himself with her. To see a prick as nothing but a tap is to deny it as a symbol of desire, above a11 as desire in the flesh and in deed. When talking of female attractiveness, do we have to say that what distinguishes a woman from a man is a hole and bumps? Such miserable plumbing and coach-building! The legal-political vision which only sees differences and wants equality to reign goes together with a castrating vision which ignores and refuses the world of desire. they put individuals side by side, never together.
The cult of the phallus must be abolished. But where is this cult of the phallus to be seen? Just as society practises a publicity cult of the female body, so the poor phallus is left in the shade. The erection becomes shameful, but not for want of putting the arse if not in a place of honour, at least on the wall. Let us remind leftist moralists that the female body is exhibited and reduced to an object of consumerism not to stimulate erections but to sell goods.
The psycho-analysts very much in fashion today have revealed to us the phallic character of the insignia of authority: sceptres, batons of command… But the phallus is not accepted and respected because it is maliciously masked. It’s not simply a game of prudish hide and seek: it is denied and its meaning is inverted. The desire for power is not the same as the power of desire. Let’s oppose phallocracy, yes, but because we are against power and for the phallus.

The contradiction in feminism

Feminism feeds off the resistance that the capitalist movement for the equality of women produces. That of the husband who doesn’t see why he should give a hand with the housework when he gets home from work. That of the woman who clings to a role and an image of fermininity which is less and less tenable. That of businesses which prefer to engage cheap labour. In fact it is easy for it to draw up a list of cases where women find themselves in inferior situations as re­gards wages, domestic circumstances, etc.–where they are the ones receiving the blows. But feminism doesn’t just feed off this resistance, it is itself resistance. It is so precisely at the point where it imagines itself to be avant-garde, subver­sive, as its real aim is legal and practical equality.
Alongside and running through the practical demands against discrimination which logically tend to liquidate the particular image and status of women, there is a will in femi­nism to self-affirmation and recognition of women as women. In other words to protect or restore women’s status which is crumbling because capital is undermining its foundations and because everybody is making room for themselves by elbow­ing someone else. Feminists are demanding the considera­tion due to women (‘respect us as women’), for the inno­cence which is to be attributed to them. They count on indul­gence towards women and their contradictions, and are an­noyed when they don’t get it.
Why this double attitude? Because on the level of the struggle for equality, which is also that of the most ruthless com­petition, woman usually finds herself in a position of inferi­ority, vulnerable at work, in the street, in her sexual relations. This inferiority is due to her education which is addressed less to the struggle than to the fact that until Moulinex ‘liber­ate women’ by bringing out hatcheries for foetuses she will continue to exercise a maternal function. An inferiority which arises out of her own nature and needs. It is not so much racism or an anti-woman ideology as practical conditions which are hard for the egalitarian ideology, State action or female charm to compensate for. But feminism, unable to go beyond this to a point where woman will not be limited to denying herself so as to ‘earn her living and her independ­ence’, works on two levels and confuses two contradictory discourses. It also plunges into dishonesty. A male chauvin­ist conspiracy is used to explain why, despite judicial procla­mations and modifications, women remain trapped. It is this being trapped that feminism expresses, an immense malaise which appears to have no way out and can only express itself through defensive attitudes that are sometimes vicious and delirious, rarely justifiable.
It is all very well for feminism to denounce male author­ity. It must, in fact, call on justice and the State if it wants to be effective. The State is the arm of the weak. It alone can seem capable of ensuring respect for those who are not able to make themselves respected. For example, the idea of wages for housework could only come about through State inter­vention. It is the same for more or less everything concern­ing the defence of women. The militantism which organises abortions, shelters battered women and supports unmarried mothers is only a solution by proxy, by ‘red’ nuns. It is, while defending oneself, a re-enforcement of State intervention in private life. A glimpse at the Soviet Union is instructive It was there that Amalrik, arrested by the KGB, got to know the ‘alcoholics’ whose wives had denounced them It was there that a woman was sentenced for passing on syphilis to two married men.
Feminism proves to be incapable of understanding the evolution of the female situation and women’s misery. By reducing the male situation to a question of power and aim­ing to oppose men with women, it becomes incapable of making a true critique of male behaviour.
The more it wants to make the capacity to live, feel and have a good time a female prerogative, the more its language smells of lies. This intellectualoid and insipid waffle hopes to evoke marvellous understanding, indescribable female sen­sations. The past is regurgitated and sets to war against ab­stractions, seeking allies in the palpitations of the body, daisy chains, the earth-mother image, and modernist and psycho­analytic stereotypes at the precise moment that it has no more to say that is concrete. An incapacity to feel, love and com­municate plays with vagueness and concepts at the same time, hoping to bring about change by passing off an empty pack­age as lavish illusions.
In this way woman does nothing but make the most of, appropriate herself of, the ghetto where she is confined in impotence, feelings, intuition and ‘human relations’.
In a more active and aggressive way the taste for power, violence and politics that would characterise males and is postured as the cause of all ills is given free rein through feminist waffle. Waffle which believes it is protecting itself from criticism in this way but which reveals its essence: jeal­ousy and competition with men, or rather a caricaturised image of men.
Can feminism be reduced to ‘move along and make room for me’? Perhaps it can for those Italian women who want 50 per cent of jobs to be assured to women. But at another level, feminism as resistance to the movement of capital is also claiming what it denounces. In its way and through its in­verted language it does no more than turn around and take up the complaint of those who say that there are no longer any ‘real’ men. The enemy is patriarchal society, male au­thoritarianism. But where is this authoritarian male, this mas­ter of the house who keeps wife and children under his thumb?
The peasant family of yesteryear, where a man could ex­ercise his physical strength and his primary role in produc­tion to establish his authority and direct the family, has prac­tically dissolved even in rural districts. Wage labour has made the man a ‘bread-winner’ expelling both himself and his pro­ductive activity from the sphere of the family. The proletar­ian brings home money, but he is not the dominant figure even inside his own family. His children do not see him toil­ing for the family subsistence before their very eyes as was the case for peasant families.
There has been a profound change in family relations and in the nature of paternal and marital authority. There is eco­nomic dependence on the father, but his authority appears ancillary and does not arise directly from his function. As a proletarian he is subjected to authority in his activity: he may have fits of despotism when he comes home, but he can no longer seriously pass himself off as the master, which he fun­damentally is not. He is not at home in the factory, is he even in the home? In the popular milieux it is frequently the woman who manages the household expenses, giving back the man his pocket money. It is a well known fact that 80 per cent of household purchases are made by women. Housework has been compared to serfdom and in fact the wage relation has had to rely on this submerged activity. But to say that woman is the servant of men is just as true and just as false as to say that she is the servant of the bourgeoisie. ‘My boss’ is the popular expression. But the man, unless he is someone is often more lost than the woman, his life and activity have less meaning than that which is left to the mother and housewife.
In bourgeois circles on the contrary, he has remained the master in the house as in the social field. Roman law was re­integrated, establishing the man’s place as the head of the household over the woman and young minors. So women and children find themselves far more restricted to a depend­ent role than in the popular strata. Inheritances have to be waited for. Today the young bourgeois rebels against daddy, sometimes even confusing proletarian revolution with the liq­uidation of their Oedipus complex. Note, however, and the Editions des Femmes know something about it, that the pos­session of great fortunes often comes back to women. Thus, according to I’Expansion, the two wealthiest people in France are women: a widow and a single woman…
There is a general contradiction between reality as it is lived, and what persists as the official figure of authority and strength as the ideal to be attained: bishops, generals, fore­men, astronauts and heads of State are usually men.
Educational needs and parental influence in the family are increasingly fulfilled by women. This reality is carried over into the school itself. The father generally remains the figure of authority to whom recourse is made and who, when the occasion arises, dispenses of punishment and reprimands. But even here he can be perceived as an outsider, the instru­ment of a power that is not his own–i.e. that of the mother who uses the threat to keep the children in hand, and who then makes him act it out.
This transformation is accompanied by a transformation in the nature of authority itself. Women and rebellious youth, along with those who take up their struggle, wage war against authority and he who incarnates it in the family. And they certainly have good reason to fight against the suffocation and constraints of the family. But in their search for a culprit aren’t they magically trying to believe in an authority whose suppression would solve everything, and which they simply lack?
The problem of the world and its dehumanisation is not just a problem of authority. It is that of the existence of a whole host of constraints which we are continually running up against. These constraints do not suddenly appear as a part or consequence of our activity, but actually prevent us from acting or even trying to. Not all of these constraints are embodied in the human form–i.e. our movements are shack­led, but these shackles emerge neither as a product of a hu­man will nor are they justified by one There is no authority to which one can either submit or oppose oneself. All that begins from a very young age. Parents who show themselves to be incapable of coping and constituting a reassuring refer­ence point give meaning to the renunciations the child must continually make and at the same time rob them of their re­bellion. Love and hate become entangled. Destructive and vindictive behaviour takes over from authority and the le­gitimised discipline of times gone by. So the urbanised chil­dren of today, with the benefits of school and psychotherapy, find themselves far more restrained in taste and movement than in the past. But then there is always Santa’s Grotto in the High Street shops and the new teaching methods!
Little boys get no better deals than little girls. They are inhibited simultaneously in their need for movement and exu­berance and more harshly repressed at the emotional level. They are reduced to nothing, yet already they are being asked to prove to themselves and others that they are something. All this engenders contradictory developments; on the one hand there is a rejection of authority often confined to its most artificial forms while on the other there is an unconfessed but profound search for idols to follow, paternal images to cling to, and more or less moth-eaten certitudes.
In its inverted form, this becomes: ‘it’s all the fault of… men, bosses…’. There is a desperate search for culprits to blame for our misery, while we are living precisely in a pe­riod in which,–and that is a sign of its revolutionary content–those ‘responsible’ are already being liquidated, even if their position is still being argued over.
Wage labour has therefore taken men out of the family, but it hasn’t stopped at recentralising or decentralising them in front of the television set. Women have also been dragged into wage labour. A part of the function they once carried out is now being undertaken by paid workers. Creches are being opened. Militants just ask that there should be more of them. Others demand that their staff be mixed and that parents par­ticipate in their running. People employ their radicality where they can!
The extension of female wage-labour in its way consti­tutes a true liberation of woman, tearing her away from the narrow world of a life of housework, and offering her finan­cial independence. But it is a liberation of the capitalist kind. A movement which does not at all abolish the inferior status of the female condition, but reproduces it in other forms
Wage differentials have often been insisted upon. The system uses women as underpaid, underskilled labour, play­ing on what is still a supplementary wage, which generally means a secondary contribution to the family that is assessed in relation to the women’s domestic function. Less attention is paid to the nature of the jobs women get and their particu­lar alienation.
The division of men and women into different sorts of paid jobs does not come about by chance. The great mass of women are used in the field of human relations (teaching, nursing, etc, or as unskilled labour, cleaners, doing assembly work, etc), in branches where capital overdevelops as it at­omises the social fabric. Women abandon their role as moth­ers to go and look after children in creches, schools and hos­pitals; they abandon their role as wives to ‘lend a hand’ as typists, secretaries and girl Fridays.
So their activity is not really that of a producer, i.e. it does not consist of conceiving or making things. It is an activity that consists of taking care of people.
The peasant woman looked after her children, but through ‘creative’ activity. Human beings develop, change, discover themselves and place themselves in relation to other people through action and the albeit fragmented modelling of the environment.
So, as capital takes charge of the whole of social life be­yond that of production as such, seeing to the management of human material and developing female wage-labour in the process, a paradox emerges. Women are constrained as never before in emotional and social life which are considered sepa­rate worlds.
Feminism as we have seen is a falsified representation of a real movement that has been accomplished by capital. Its real and positive role, like that of ecology, is that it brings problems to light albeit in a disguised or inverted way. It is up to the communist movement and to theoretical quest to discover their true dimension and resolution.
The fundamental weakness is that general change and discontent are reduced to the woman’s question. The oppo­sition between men and women is, and is becoming increas­ingly more so, but one instance of a general system of fric­tion which the hierarchical structure of society is producing by playing on inequalities and oppositions that are continu­ally being reproduced while the old norms are being liqui­dated. There is a general crisis of identity and a general crisis of human relations. This crisis, starting from real fixations and their distorting amplification by the media, was presented for a whole period as a generation gap, and now it is being transformed into opposition between men and women.
The depth of the proletarian movement manifests itself to the extent that women participate in it. It is when things get serious, touching deep into daily life and daily needs, that women with their scorn of the political game (apart from a few notable exceptions, from Catherine II of Russia to Margaret Thatcher), throw themselves into the fray. The women who accuse their striking husbands of irresponsibility and an incapacity to bring money home for the family in an effort to protect a certain security, or who are very docile at work, are the same women who turn round and call their husbands cowards when their radicalism leaps ahead as the struggle starts to upturn the social order.
The problem for communism is not the achievement of equality between men and women. It is not a matter of de­mocratising the couple or the family and normalising day to day relationships. It is not a matter of setting up rotas for domestic tasks or hunting down fascism in the kitchen and the bedroom.
Communism attacks the roots of the family institution. It does not dissolve the family, it is capitalism that is empting it of all meaning and taking the education of children from it, entrusting it to specialised institutions. As communism gen­eralises free access to goods, and amongst other things trans­forms and increases the space available for living in, it de­stroys the foundations and economic function of the family. Also, as it is the realisation of the human community it de­stroys the need for a refuge within that community
The emancipation of women and children is guaranteed as there will be no constraints on life other than mutual at­traction. It is on this basis that their relationships will de­velop. The basis will not only be relationships of affection; people will associate to act, to move around, etc. The generalization of the community will be such that individuals will not have to cling to this or that partner or have a fundamental fear of losing them. A mother (or father) will not have to submit to economic dependence in order to feed their chil­dren. The latter will not grow up in the smothering atmos­phere of the family, they will no longer be the property of their parents to be fought over in the case of divorce. They will learn to look after themselves more easily and more quickly than they do today.
However, all relations of domination and conflict will not simply disappear because of this. But these will not be insti­tutionalised and perpetuated within a power structure because the institutional framework and economic constraints which make this possible will have disappeared.
Capital takes account of people according to their func­tion. It profoundly ignores the differences between the sexes therefore. In the economic and political sphere this becomes an ornament which regulates advantages and disadvantages in the promotion stakes. This is carried over outside serious social matters to become marginalised in leisure activities.
Economic necessity is a great leveller, But the difference between the sexes remains. And communism cannot dismiss it, but on the contrary- will recognise it in full as it is the so­cial expression of human needs beyond economics. Men and women have different needs and a need for this difference.
Those who see everything back to front think that educa­tion is at the root of everything, needs to be changed, and that by educating girls and boys in the same way and offering them a similar image of father and mother things will take care of themselves. An imbecilic intent to level, an incapac­ity to play and to enjoy the difference that brings the sexes closer together.
It is this teacher-pupil relationship with its falseness and colonialism and imposition of norms that must be liquidated, particularly because it is a matter of active, militant and pro­gressive pedagogy. Subtle relationships need to be cultivated wherein each individual, starting from their own biological peculiarities, discovers their particular social identity, their own desire and that of the opposite sex.
Communism will not set up new rules and taboos to keep men and women in limited roles It will not constrain people in any way and no doubt men and women will carry out simi­lar functions, but they will not be reduced to that function and from this simple fact everyone will act their own way, which does not exclude their sexual nature. Neither will it fall back into the old division of labour.
The sexual difference is excluded from the world of work today, even though it reappears through the back door and capitalism is using it to divide, using wage differentials so as to underpay what is no more than labour. It is enough to make the partisans of equal and uniform misery rise up in anger. Communism however, which liquidates work as a separate sphere and activity, will occupy itself with reuniting the two sexes, along with children, in the same activities, but with­out de-sexing them.
Competitive sport offers a caricature of the capitalist uni­verse, where the pleasure of physical effort and responding to a challenge ends up lost in the tuning of winning machines. Now that women have joined the race there is no hesitation about denaturing them by stuffing them with male hormones so that they’ll go faster. What separates communism from such repugnant practices is evident