PARTISAN REVIEW
189
ferent races originating
in
different parts of the planet could agree to
live quite separately again (with the habits and mentalities of each strict–
ly protected against all incursions of cultural as well as economic im–
perialism). But women and men will undoubtedly always cohabit.
If,
therefore, the answer to sexism - unlike racism - is not even conceiv–
ably separatism, then defending the distinct moral and aesthetic "tradi–
tions" of each sex (.to preserve something equivalent to "cultural plural–
ity") and attacking the single standard of intellectual excellence or ra·
tionality as male "cultural imperialism" (to revalidate the unknown and
despised "women's culture") are misleading tactics in the struggle to
liberate women.
The
aim
of struggle should not be to protect the differences between
the two sexes but to undermine them. To create a nonrepressive relation
between women and men means to erase as far as possible the conven–
tional demarcation lines ·that have been set up between the two sexes,
to reduce the tension between women and men that arises from "other–
ness."
As
everyone has noticed, there has been a lively tendency among
young people in recent years to narrow and even confuse sex differences
in clothes, hair styles, gestures, taste. But this first step toward depolariz–
ing the sexes, partly coopted within capitalist forms of cQll1sumership as
mere "style" (the commerce of unisex boutiques), will be denied its
political implications unless the tendency takes root at a deeper level.
The more profound depolarization of the sexes must take place in
the world of work and, increasingly, in sexual relations themselves. As
"otherness" is reduced, some of the energy of sexual attraction between
the sexes will decline. Women and men will certainly continue to make
love and to pair off
~n
couples. But women and men will no longer
primarily
defoine each other as potenJtial sexual partners. In a nonrepressive
nonsexist society, sexuality will in one sense have a more important role
than it
has
today - because it will be more diffused. Homosexual choices
will
be as valid and respectable as heterosexual choices; both will grow
out of a genuine bisexuality. (Exclusive homosexuality - which, like ex–
clusive heterosexuality, is learned - would be much less common in a
nonsexist society than it is at present.) But in such a society, sexuality
will in another sense be less impol1tant than it is now - because sexual
relations will no longer be hysterically craved as a substitute for genuine
freedom and for so many other pleasures (intimacy, intensity, feeling
of belonging, blasphemy) which this society frustrates.
3. In your opinion, what is the relationship between the struggle for
women's liberation and the class struggle? Do you believe the first must
be subordinated to the second?
I see little relation
at
present between the class struggle
and
the
