“So. . . how do you torture a woman?”

Well, you can tie her up on the rack and rip her bones apart from the sockets. That’s one way. Or you can tear apart her mind and her body. Now there’s two ways to do this: You can pry her body away from her mind, or you can pry her mind away from her body. Either way, it works out to the same thing. You stop the woman. She can think but not act, or she can act but not think.

To pry her body away from her mind, you need to physically humiliate her. Of course, rape is the most traditional method, but it’s not the only one, by any means. You can ridicule her body, or make fun of the things she does. You can make her self-conscious about her looks. You can make her strap her breasts in. You can make her embarrassed about her periods. You can make her frightened of puberty, frightened of sex, frightened of aging, frightened of eating. You can terrorize her with her own body, and then she will torture herself.

Now, if you want to pry her mind apart from her body, you have to make her believe she’s crazy. I mean, you can put her in a courtroom and have all the experts certify that she’s mentally incompetent, but again–there are a lot of other ways to go about this. You can just annul her. We all know how that goes. Interrupt her, change the subject, ignore her, patronize her, trivialize her, dismiss her. You can deprive her of her history, of her art, of her spiritual traditions. You can restrict her contact with other women. You can have a fit over women-only space–like the whole rest of the world isn’t men-only…You can lie to her so chronically and so comprehensively, the lying becomes the entire context for her existence. It’s really not terribly hard to make a woman believe she’s crazy, if you control all the resources.

And if you’re a real expert at torture, you can do both at the same time! You can offer to love her body if she’ll just give up her mind. Or you can offer to love her mind, and at the same time reject her body. That’s what I got. The Church had so much love for my soul, they just had to burn my body. On the other hand, they promised to take care of my body, if I would give up everything I knew was true.

You think the days of the Inquisition are over? Every woman who’s ashamed of her body is a victim of torture. Every woman who doubts her own judgment is a victim of torture. So just how many women do you know who haven’t been pulled apart?

________

From The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays by Carolyn Gage (1994, HerBooks), pp. 21-22.

Filed under: feminism as politics, lesbian feminism, personal is political, words from women by Amy's Brain Today