Sex Equality : Difference and Dominance

A materialist feminist approach to women's oppression destroys the idea that women are a "natural group": "a socia! group of a special kind, a group perceived as natural, a group of men considered as materially specific in their bodies." A lesbian society destroys the artificial (social) fact constituting women as a "natural group." A lesbian society pragmatically reveals that the division from men of which women have been the object is a political one and shows how we have been ideologically re-built into a "natural group. " In our case, ideology goes far since our bodies as well as our minds are the product of this manipulation. We have been compelled in our bodies and in our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us. Distorted to such an extent that our deformed body is what they call "natural," is what is supposed to exist as such before oppression. Distorted to such an extent that at the end oppression seems to be a consequence of this "nature" in ourselves (a nature which is only an idea). What a materialist analysis does by reasoning, a lesbian society accomplishes in fact: not only is there no natural group "women" (we lesbians are a living proof of it) but as individuals as well we question "woman," which for us, as for Simone de Beauvoir thirty years ago, is only a myth. She said: '::'One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine." ONE IS NOT BORN A WOMAN 179