62
PARTISAN REVIEW
society by women-based on specifically female needs, feelings, and
ways of thinking. Evidently they too half unconsciously share the
idealized belief of many men in an inherited female principle that can
bring redemption from the rationalizing, egotistically ' hierarchical,
and destructive male philosophy of competition. Such notions unmis–
takeably combine a rational assessment of the consequences of men 's
belief in their superiority with irrational female fantasies of salvation.
Still we should not overlook the fact that it was precisely the
exclusion of woman from male competitive and supremacist thinking,
the special mode of her education, which frequently brought her
advantages of character such as greater sensitivity and capacity for love.
And I certainly do not mean to dispute that woman's political,
economic, and social situation can be improved by her alliance and
solidarity with other women. But it does not seem to me sensible to
make man the enemy or to exclude him
a priori
as a potential partner
in the struggle for a more just world.
It
is not at all uncommon,
however, for feminist groups today to retreat completely into them–
selves. Lesbian relationships are cultivated on the assumption that men
are incapable of understanding the female psyche. Not all feminists, of
course, aim at a revolution under lesbian auspices, but among intellec–
tuals such prominent figures as Simone de Beauvoir believe that only a
lesbian relationship can fulfill a woman 's capacity for experience
while contributing to her liberation from male supremacy.
In
her view,
only "the destruction of the family and the myth of the family and the
myth of motherhood and of maternal instinct" can end the oppression
of woman. Similar opinions are put forward in Alice Schwarzer's book
The "Little Difference" and its Big Consequences,
which very quickly
became a bestseller in Germany. According to Schwarzer it is sexuality
that perpetuates the oppression of woman. At the center of her interest
are the experience and psychic working-out of female sexual functions.
Oral-genital intercourse or the manual stimulation of the clitoris are,
according to her, more gratifying for woman than coitus. Therefore she
concludes that the communication of women with one another,
including sexual communication, is greater and more satisfying than
that between women and men. The idealization of lesbian relation–
ships here is apparent, especially if one compares the reports of
lesbians in her book with those of the exclusively harrassed and
oppressed heterosexual women who are represcnlcd .
Once women become aware of their degradation and mental
deformation their anger is not easily suppressed, and so long as an
uncritical presumption of male superiority continues to manifest itself
