Women's slavery

Man is to woman as master is to slave.
- Aristotle

You go to women? Do not forget the whip.
- Nietzsche

Women-slaves

Whether or not women are a social class is a highly contentious matter, especially among left-wing Marxist circles. It is such a critical question to certain orthodox minds that refuse to accept us as a social class, because to do so would presuppose the need for a revolution of our own. The same is true for female party militants who seek to marry the class struggle to feminism; recognizing women as a social class would invalidate their whole underlying mental framework. A class or not a class, that is the question. If we are a class, it naturally follows that we have the right to a "serious" revolution, by the book, as is our due. If we are not a class, if our condition does not fit an abstract definition, though it may constitute the greatest injustice in all the world, then we remain dependent on others' revolution, on the "principal contradiction."

From the strictest Marxist orthodox perspective, one could demonstrate that women are a class; all women in the world have the same means of production and we all suffer exploitation as the female sex. Differences in living standards do not affect the reality of womanhood any more than the differences in living standards between a Swedish and Galician laborer negate their shared standing as members of the proletariat and suffering due to the exploitation of their labor power. Property relations, though, mustn't be confused with relations of production. Relations of production scatter individual women into different families and into the different male social classes; we are not ourselves members of the bourgeoisie or proletariat, but rather their wives. Our dispersion is so dramatic and radical that it prevents us from recognizing our common destiny. Hence, our loss of identity. We are caught in "private" relations of production, and from their private nature spring our difficulties to organize and establish ourselves.

But I do not mean to get bogged down demonstrating that women are a social class, as I find it trite that an abstract definition should grant us our revolutionary passport.

I want to ground myself in realer, more concrete concepts. Throughout this piece, I will champion the solid and specific and, to the greatest possible extent, avoid abstractions. I do not aim to define concepts, but rather to truly understand how we are exploited and compare our exploitation with others'. To interrogate the shape and substance of our exploitation is to lay the groundwork for liberation.

I will move on, then, to explore the concepts of caste and slavery. Caste and class characteristics do not contradict each other, because they are separate concepts. The concept of class is abstract and universal; that of caste is solid and specific, the product of psychobiological syncretism. Using philosophical terminology, the first derives from reasoning and the second from comprehension.

Caste, like Woman, is a category founded on a biology that is impossible to change. Accordingly, it is a more stable state of being than class. A proletarian can change class (by means of an inheritance, prize, etc.). A woman cannot ever stop being a woman, just as a Black person can never change the color of their skin. One is born Woman as one is born Black. By comparison, there is no biological or natural basis to the concept of class.

Women, like Black people, suffer discrimination justified by "nature." One mustn't confuse this assertion with the fascist notion that Woman is the inferior sex, which would be akin to affirming that Black people are inferior due to the color of their skin. Caste is not a set of attitudes or ideas; it is rooted in a clear economic reality. The economic reality underpinning the female caste is its form of production: children and domestic work. Discrimination against us originates in our specific and limited productive capacity. Only women have the capacity to conceive and bear human beings. It is a form of production limited to women. Whereas, in the case of class division, discrimination occurs because one party disposes of the labor power of another, for women, economic exploitation occurs because of a specific, socially indispensable aptitude. Caste divisions, then, are founded on very identifiable characteristics, like sex, skin color, the lips, etc.

For all that we may proclaim our freedom, as a caste, women are excluded, cloistered away in a ghetto we call family. Women's freedom is the freedom to be sold into marriage as an "apparently free" worker who actually feels obligated to sell her labor power. Divorce--usually construed as the freedom to break the marital bond--is a false freedom so long as women remain condemned to marriage in the first place. As a caste, women are "neutered" and wholly dispossessed of our own humanity.

Caste consciousness overshadows class consciousness. Masses of Black workers were relegated to a subclass (in the USA) so they would feel "inferior" to even the white lower classes--who, of course, are conscious and proud of their whiteness and of their difference from Black people. No white person, miserable though they may be, would ever agree to change places with a black person; no man would ever change their status or their sex for a woman's.

All women's "natural" work is to produce and raise future members of society. It involves nine months of pregnancy--laborious, uncomfortable, and physically dangerous, because it weakens the female body. Birth follows, equally dangerous and painful. Then nutrition and caretaking of the new creature, day and night, teaching it to walk, language acquisition, hygiene, etc. Bringing a new being into the world, teaching it and socializing it, is the most important work in all of society (compare it, for instance, to building a car or another machine and getting it to run). Furthermore, it requires intense, continuous effort with no defined labor hours (day and night) and causes great physical and psychological wear. If this job were performed outside of the family environment, it would be valued and appreciated. Labeling it "natural" externalizes the value and cost of production. The State benefits from women's specific work through men's parental rights. The fruit of female labor does not belong to her. Nonetheless, in society's eyes, men may as well be able to give birth, because it is they who continue their family lines.

Women, like all other exploited groups, must accept our suffering without protest. To that end, society idealizes maternity and the trope of the self-sacrificing mother, sweet and long-suffering. Thus: women's revindication of maternity through our insistence upon recognition of its true value bears no relation to the idealization of Mother and maternity as "natural," sublime, mythified, and distant from reality. The latter ultimately serves the goal of expropriation. Just as work for the proletariat has become a tragedy rather than a form of personal fulfillment--in as far as the means of production do not belong to them and their work is used to benefit capital--so for women. Our specific work has likewise become an obstacle to our social fulfillment, when it should be biologically and personally satisfying as well as a collective and social good. We shall reject the manichaean idealization of the mother role and simultaneously revindicate the production of children, its value and prestige, to eventually abolish male parental rights.

Female Slavery

When we think of female slaves, we think of Black female slaves in movies or novels of the past. We must liberate ourselves of prejudice, then, in order to understand that women in all societies share certain characteristics with slaves. Through studies of slavery in Greece, we can compare different aspects and come to the conclusion that our society, like that of ancient Greece, is built upon on slavery; it is rotten.

Slave labor as natural. The relations of production in a slave society are such that one part of society is treated by the other as simply an inorganic and natural condition of its own reproduction. Slaves are things, instruments of production, the inorganic condition of production. They hold the same status as other elements of nature--livestock, etc.--or as the tools used to work the land. A slave, being human, can do certain things that an animal or a machine cannot.

Women's work is also considered "natural," as if it were our destiny or proclivity. All the characteristics attributed to women have a natural hue. It is natural to love your children (an unloving attitude towards one's family is, by definition, unnatural), it is natural to love Man, it is natural to produce offspring, it is natural to do domestic work. But none of this is natural and it is all subject to rigid control, an apparatus of production regulated by the society of men. Women find themselves disempowered, whether by coercive and penal means (think the illegality of abortion, etc.) or by ideological brainwashing (think the idealization of the role of mother and saintly wife and perfect homemaker...), so that they submit their own bodies to the service of others.

The concept of the "natural," applied thus, is immanentist in origin and serves the needs of fascism writ large. Equating nature and culture often causes people to accept events and phenomena as they are. The goal is to convince the exploited that they deserve what they suffer because it is natural. "Anatomy is destiny," said Napoleon of women, who he considered instruments of production, much like slaves. Ideologies, the cultural superstructure, work on behalf of the system to convince women to play the part that's expected of them. For that reason, the pseudofeminisms that look only to the cultural aspect of female oppression cannot get at the foundation, the economic infrastructure, of the exploitation of women's "natural" work.

The State takes women's existence for granted. All of history was built upon us, its sustenance, dark and hidden as the land whose fertility we reap. In previous historical periods, some have doubted whether or not we even have a human soul. As a woman of the twentieth century, I think that if the human soul, as defined by exploitative men, is synonymous with terror, violence, hunger, and all the miseries that comprise the history of humanity (of Man) so far, they may be right. We do not need a human soul.

Just as the Greeks always assumed slavery to be a given reality of human existence, men--without interrogating the notion at all--understand women's status and labor to stem from the natural order of things. In the ancient world, they were incapable of imagining a civilized society without the existence of slaves. Men also see the family and women's labor as foundations of society.

In the Greek world, there was a continuous social debate leading all beliefs and institutions to come under attack sooner or later. The thinkers and philosophers thus kept their critical quills sharpened. Plato judged the reality of his time in quite a radical way, or so it seemed. But despite abundantly referencing slavery in his work, he never questioned it. Plato's work effectively lends greater legitimacy to the authority of noblemen over their slaves and further accentuates the difference between slave and free man. The intellectuals of our times do not question female slavery either, however extremely radical they may be in the masculine political arena.

Believers in human brotherhood and humanists of antiquity, like the Cynics, the Stoics, and the Christians, did not oppose slavery. The humanists, moralists, and writers of today do not oppose female slavery either, and all of them are implicated in it. We witness again and again how men who publicly defend social justice--an abstraction--can behave like true tyrants in the bosom of their families. What exquisite and delicate poets they are, but in private, sadistic dictators. The widow and children of Panero made a film in which they denounced the poet's behavior within the family. It is called Disenchantment. All women know that thousands of films could be made about thousands of disenchantments. Hesiod's Works and Days, a piece from the seventh century BC about human labor and its suffering, defends the right of every farmer to utilize slave labor. I cannot help but compare it with the declarations of Santiago Carrillo, secretary general of the Communist Party, in a speech to the peasants (1979): "Do not fear; we won't take away your cows or your women." Once slaves, now women, are inherent to men's own work and are as "natural" as the land or livestock.

Durkheim wrote, "The voluntary nature of a custom or an institution should never be taken for granted." It seems that nobody's heeded his advice. There is an accepted social burden; even women accept it. And in this way, men today can speak of social justice and of democracy while they continue to exploit women. Similarly, in ancient Greece, they spoke of individual liberty even as slave ownership reached its greatest heights in the most democratic cities, like Athens. They discovered the idea of individual liberty alongside the institutional framework within which it could be realized. Similarly, men know that they remain free within a marriage while women become their property. The Greeks gave us an interpretation of progress tied to both freedom and slavery. Men hold up their example of historic "progress" parallel to and at the cost of female slavery.

Also shared between women and slaves is a disregard for our situation and the labor we perform.

We can compare the Greeks' inability to recognize slaves' work with that of men to recognize women's work. Not even the most exploited of men recognize the exploitation of women. An average man shares his superiors' ideals and aspirations, at least in his dreams. The most oppressed worker would own his own slaves if he could. The poor had slaves in Greece, and no free man in the ancient world, not even a poor man, ever raised his voice in protest against slavery. Today's poor likewise have women, and we still hear no masculine voices rising up to denounce women's slavery or to recognize our labor (with select opportunistic or assimilating exceptions).

All women were trained to do housework, indispensable tasks like childcare and education, husbandcare, transformation of products into edible goods (food preparation), object maintenance (care of the home and its material goods), daily transport and acquisition of products, etc. All of these jobs are socially indispensable. A married woman with children works a minimum of 80 unstructured hours weekly, including nights, when children cry or call out for their mothers, and husbands wake up to claim sexual services.

In addition to domestic work and childcare, a woman must fulfill her family's emotional needs, an "emotional service station" where the man satisfies his instincts--libido, hunger, and exhaustion.

But the means of domestic production--like those of rural production--cannot be properly assessed by economic criteria. Metrics like behavior or a positive attitude are more relevant, because domestic production is not destined for exchange. In a society where merchandise rules, domestic work is not recognized (like slaves' work was not recognized), nor is it considered real work, because it lies outside of and contradicts the capitalist system.

We call a female a "working girl" when she works outside the home. The hours of physical and psychological wear within the home do not count. Women fall into the trap ourselves without realizing it, because we disparage our own work, like the slaves did. But all men depend on the "non-work" of women to survive. The labor power of each "worker" is reproduced daily at home.

Disregard for women's work in the home deprives them, as a group, of a sense of worth. Women's collective subordination and the nature of female conditioning serve to maintain the status quo. Men's work is real; it changes and transforms things. Women's work in the home changes nothing. Whatever they clean gets dirty again, whatever they cook rapidly disappears, etc. They are immersed in a repetitive and mysterious process with no real results. In this way, the bond tying homemakers to the real world is their husband. It is no wonder, given their work and social status, that they are easily attacked by fits of neurosis, hysteria, nervous breakdowns, neuralgia, etc. Psychiatrists know that there is no shortage of female clientele. Deep down, they feel empty, good-for-nothing, worthless. It is not just inferiority, it is uselessness. Women do not live the life that we desire. Not even if we deceive ourselves, let ourselves be swayed by all the propaganda that tries to soothe our doubts about our work. Let's take, for example, the ads for cleaning products: "A whiter wash," "Shine brighter," etc. They show women who are proud of the results: "My husband wears the whitest shirts in the office," says a dim housewife snidely. "How do you do it?" marvels her jealous friend... and so on. To fill the void in the housewife's life, they offer her the image of the indispensable woman, self-sacrificing and submissive to her husband and children.

Capitalism, which cannot admit that families are sustained by women's sacrifices, does not view domestic work as real, because it does not fit the dominant ideology about work in general. It is invisible work, hidden. Men, generally, are not present when it is being done. Women try to do housework when men are not there, almost without them realizing that anything has been done at all. There is no need to bother men with domestic problems. When they arrive home, on top of a neat, tidy house and a hot meal on the table, they must also find a smiling woman, ready to listen patiently to her capitalist warrior's daily tribulations. If a woman tries to do certain tasks while her husband is home, she'll often hear a protest: "Not now, woman! Do it later." Later, surreptitiously, as if it were shameful, because it is not even really a job. It seems rather more of a curse. Cleaning and shininess become fetishized. "I clean, therefore I am." Mariella Righini parodies the female existence as a repetitive circle, entirely lacking creativity. The routine of domestic work in isolation turns the female mind into vacant space, like Groundhog Day.

The absence of political influence, of collective participation in public or State matters. In Greece, every citizen was a political creature, poor though he may have been, and his voice and vote--which is to say, his interests--could reach the agora and the tribunals. Today's men also have recognized legal rights, poor though they may be. Women acquired the right to vote only recently and, still today, we need our husband's permission to work, sell or buy property, travel with our children, etc.

Slaves participated in all activities--there were even slaves in high culture--however they were never allowed into deliberative or judicial bodies. In the supporting bureaucracies, yes, as secretaries and administrators; there were no activities, productive or unproductive, public or private, pleasant or unpleasant, that were not undertaken by slaves in some eras and places of the Greek world. But politics was always the exception.

Still today, the world of politics is masculine. Women remain at the edges of public life, in the dark, secluded. They participate neither in justice nor in the march of public and state affairs.

In the courts, ministries, etc., women are efficient secretaries and typists. A private secretary fills the additional role of her boss's second wife.

If some women have ever had, or still have, a position of political influence, they were mostly mere mouthpieces for men. From queendoms to the "female politicians" of today, women have played the same roles in politics as in private life: servants to men or courtesans. Through relationships with politically important men, they can reach high positions, but they will always make decisions imposed upon them and derived from their status. The late Perón was an expert in bringing women of "dubious reputation" to the highest ranks of the nation. A Freudian analysis of the case would be beyond my purview.

All of the women who struggled, and struggle still, in political parties know that the decisions are made by men in the highest ranks, at the peak of "democratic centralism," while women do the groundwork, submissive in their roles. They serve the cause, that Sacred Entity, like proper priestesses. But to be honest, we have to recognize that they are being used. They give the impression that the party welcomes female political participation in order to win over the female vote (let's remember that all parties promise the moon during an election campaign). The presence of a few ladies gives parties plausible deniability against accusations of sexual discrimination and diminishes the strength of feminism--which is to say, of women's independent organization for our own liberation.

The assimilated women who lend themselves out to the masculine political game are betraying their own, all other women, because the struggle in a male world is for masculine rights and not for feminine revindication; because masculine revindication contradicts feminine; because they are helping to strengthen masculine power; because they are held up as examples of "rationality" while feminists are depicted as mad; because they try to demonstrate that women have political participation when we really do not.

The few who manage to reach some public position with real responsibility are the tip of a great pyramid, the base of which is made up of women who have no path to its cynical heights. The women at the top--besides themselves adopting dismissive masculine attitudes towards those at the bottom--are used by the system to exemplify the possibility of emancipation for all women from the misery in which we are immersed. They take part in the great lie, since most women cannot break free from the economic and ideological exploitation they suffer, much less compete with men at their own game. They can avail themselves of the privilege of feeling a step higher than their poor illiterate neighbors, who play only the parts they're given. But they can never be one of them; they cannot be men. As superior as they may feel, they are treated as women by their male colleagues. They must perform their duties at home if they are married (it is illuminating to witness the behavior of "important" women when they are at home with their husbands), and in the streets they can be the butt of tricks and jokes by any man of any social status. They can even be raped in the doorway as they arrive home. And at a meeting, even a high-level one, the men will be thinking about what they would look like naked instead of considering their arguments--if they manage to share them, that is. They are women and that's that. Their privilege is false and laughable. Those women experience "a painful and constant ambiguity," much like assimilated colonized peoples, "rejected by the colonizer, they partially share the real-life conditions of the colonized. On the other hand, they reject the values of the colonized as belonging to an outdated world from which they hope to eventually escape." The recently assimilated generally go much farther than the average colonizer. They overcompensate, a further colonization; they show proud disdain for the colonized... still quite astounded by their own privilege, they defend it anxiously and ferociously. They purport to escape their political and social condition, taking the side of the colonizer, defending exclusively their own interests, and they end up adopting their ideology, even towards their own people and themselves. All women are oppressed and all are affected by oppression a priori. They will never be able to switch to the privileged side, even if they surpass its members in wealth and earn important degrees or titles. The proof of universal oppression against women is that we are referred to in the plural. We are never characterized differentially, but rather as an anonymous collective. "Women's things," "women are...," "women are all the same...," etc. We hear phrases like those because we do not exist as individuals.

The system would like us to believe that conflict between women and men is not a problem in the field of public activity. The male-female contradiction does not exist any more than problems existed publicly between freemen and slaves in Greece.

The female representatives at the tip of the pyramid thus erase most women's experiences of exploitation. All exploitative systems have used some exploited individuals for political gain. That is how, in the United States, where Black people face social discrimination and live in ghettos, some black people are installed in important, representative positions. They exemplify the possibility of escaping the ghetto and the misery of their own caste, but it is a fallacy. No obtainable ascension is actually able to transform a Black person into an equal in the United States. Their hair, skin, and lips supersede their class status, unforgettable, like a woman never forgets her sex. However, the creation of a Black bourgeoisie was a specific US policy called tokenism (from "token": symbol, sign). It was the concession yielded by some symbolic reforms that hide discrimination against and segregation of Black people while integrating some privileged individuals to divide forces and weaken the opposition. Analogously, for a woman to let herself be shown off as an example of an emancipated woman is treason against everyone else. The fact that there are some women in important positions does not negate sexism or the group's collective exploitation. On the contrary, it restrains our unity and strength. Racism has not disappeared in the US just because there are Black people in positions of power. It is simply camouflaged. The colonization of Galicia's land and people has not diminished just because there have been, and are, Galicians in high offices at the top of the Spanish government.

Just as free men, even poor ones, exploited slaves merely for being slaves, men oppress women as a sex, even those of a higher social status than certain men. A poor man is more valuable than any woman and can look down upon and laugh at her. We are oppressed merely for being women. No man is prepared to change places with one of us, just as no white person, miserable though they may be, wants to trade places with a Black person, not even one with a higher social status than their own.

Left out of politics, left out of history, left out of society, women are rendered incapable of any free act or any decision that would help us to align the world's destiny with our world's.

Surely any man on the street could respond that he is in the same predicament. Men, free citizens, can complain that they do not count in matters of state, that they are not listened to, that they are cheated, that they cannot stop the injustices, the wars, etc. True. But at least they have the right, the potential power, even if it is not always effective. They can feel cheated, but they are not slaves. Cyclically, when they reach a certain tipping point, they ignite their revolutionary ire, they explode, and they turn the tables (what a shame that the table remains!). They cling onto their pride in these periodic shake-ups, inscribed in the pages of history. Women (as a group) cannot feel responsible for these events. We are left out of the game, even as we suffer the consequences of the story written at the edges of our duties. We have lost the habit of active participation in history, just as the Galician people have for centuries. When they ask us to reenter the wheel of history (as generally happens during elections in Galicia), we only end up disappointed once again.

We lack a past, present, and future. Our memory must be that of Man and his actions. We must identify with a foreign world, masculine in all its structures, even that of language, which we must use to think and communicate.

Either we let ourselves assimilate and become the other (aggression against ourselves) or we reconquer all of our mutilated dimensions.

The slaves of antiquity and modern-day women share our status as things, merchandise, instruments of production. We have completely lost our own humanity. Being dispossessed a priori of our production, our very life and death are at the disposal of others.

Slaves were things. The free Greeks took advantage of their personhood, their labor, and their very lives. The same happens with women today. Even if we seem to be free on paper, every woman knows, deep down inside herself, that she is not, and that we should thwart the social camouflage that thwarts clear vision. Men keep the power over our lives and deaths. It was only very recently that if a jealous husband murdered his wife and her lover in flagrante, his crime was not considered murder. Even if the law has changed in this regard, customary law still considers a husband's jealousy a mitigating factor in his crime. The woman is the guilty party "in the eyes of society" for having deceived her husband.

Quite a high number of women are routinely beaten by men, especially within the marital home. We know that this happens all the time, even "among the best families," and men are never punished for it. "Beat your wife regularly. If you don't know why, she does," said Confucius way back in his time. So the female body is mutilated day after day, and nobody's bothered by it. Similarly, in Greece, nobody ever uttered a peep in support of abused slaves. The repression of women is brutal and subtle. It starts in girlhood, with an education that makes us dependent and denies us all creativity, with an imposed sexuality that benefits only men, and with unwanted pregnancies, rape, beatings, etc. Men unload all their societal frustrations upon women and women feel like body-objects, things used each day. If we are in a public place with a man, even if he is just a friend or acquaintance, we are automatically the property of that man, and no stranger would dare approach us (our mothers would say they were "spoken for" when they went out in the company of a man). If we are at a dance and a man wants to dance with us, he will ask permission from our escort. It is their game. We are depersonalized objects.

We all feel like things and objects throughout our lives. Having a drink with a male friend the other day, a male acquaintance of his arrived and joined our conversation. In the enthusiasm of the argument, he put his hand over mine. When he realized it, he turned to my friend and apologized. I sat staring at my hand, shaking it to make sure that it was mine.

During operations, births, C-sections, women are toys and our lives depend on male doctors and husbands. The husband must authorize the doctor to tear, cut, and do what he wants with the woman's body. As such, her life and death are at his command.

Depersonalized, women are respected in society because of the men who hold power over them. As the daughter of that guy or the wife of that fellow. Men have their private territory marked and nobody else is to come sniffing around. The man's social class, prestige, and economic status are relevant in cases of indiscretion. Social and economic status are important when it comes to trespassing. The game remains ever between them, those who hold power, and women thus lose any humanity of our own.

Slaves did not work for their own benefit, and women's production is also expropriated--a person's intimate life used for productive ends. Our own body is an instrument of production and we lack rights to it; it is for use by the masters, and not only to produce children. They also force us to smile, to eroticize our manners, to be feminine, sweet, patient, etc.

Our body's enslavement can even change its shape. Indeed, the masters can demean certain organs and exalt others, modify, castrate, hide or display, elongate or shorten, according to the culture and fashion. Our bodies are always used. Even women who manage to escape child or domestic production, being women still, cannot flee the instrumentalization of their bodies. We all have to make ourselves pretty; our looks have value. Looking good is prerequisite to achieving anything, from marriage to work, approval, etc. His wife or secretary's attractiveness functions as shorthand for a man's social status. Sales ladies are the true luxury dolls, women-objects whose beauty--their bodies, eyes, and smiling mouths--become instruments of production. They must show up to work well-quaffed and made up and are checked daily for compliance, as if they themselves were the merchandise for sale. Even the expressions, gazes, and gestures they must employ to sell a product (different for male and female customers) are imposed on them. Body and sexuality, pressed into the service of productivity. And, normally, women accept, because we are constantly reminded that we are women, that we have a body and a face to sell. We must adapt our behavior to the system, match it to its opposite, which we even provoke and implore instinctually, deprived as we are of agency.

In every moment, our inferiority increases masculine prestige. Masculine favor permits the recognition of our sex--which is to say, of our identity--because our society is organized for feminine attributes to secure masculine attention and favor and, in so doing, justify their existence. Woman is, for all intents and purposes, "her sex." Our education serves our femininity, our ability to play the part of woman and to accentuate the features inherent to our sex. Girls see psychiatrists and psychologists less than boys, but they are more often taken to fix physical defects or orthodontics. Their physical health is more important than their mental health, because their bodies will become instruments of production for society. A little boy will be educated to perform a job in society, a little girl to "be deserving." That is why women must start learning to use their sex and their bodies for social advancement in girlhood. We can use our "charms" to find work or a husband. In any case, we become objects to purchase and sell.

Women must render all sorts of services to their husbands, not the least of which is psychotherapy. A husband channels all the nervous tension he has accumulated in his social and work relationships through his wife. He has no other place to do so and, as we know, he blows off steam at home. Though he may find other outlets--movies, hunting, playing sports, etc.--the feminine figure remains essential. Men must be aware of a constant female presence; they must feel her at all times. What is the purpose, then, of the naked bodies in journalistic magazines like Interviú or Playboy, where serious articles are interspersed with female merchandise-bodies? These magazines are obvious proof of female objectification. We are invisible as people, permanent fantasies that men carry in their heads. They are sold women when they read. They are served up female flesh when they watch TV, appetizing and cooked just right. A glass of cognac is not just a glass of cognac; it is also a feminine hand's caress. A Model X car is not just a car; it is also a curvy blonde "on her hands and knees." Cologne, shaving cream, everything--they are all women, women's voices, women's sex. We are the great male fantasy. And they dare to call this permanent degradation of our personhood, this abject use of our bodies, "sexual freedom." "Sexual freedom," to the system, is permission to consume the female body. If feminists protest our dehumanization, they call us puritan and backward.

Kiosks are full of female bodies, bodies of titillating women in all manner of postures and attitudes. Women who are always revved up and ready for sex. Men dream of going out onto the street, finding a woman they like and, voila!, straight to bed, not a moment wasted, because women have to be willing, like those in the magazines with their permanent orgasm faces. Many orgasms, sex as accumulation. Capitalism does the same with sex as it does with every other product--substitute use-value with objects of consumption. Quality with quantity. "Consume sex, gentleman!" and they traffic in our flesh and kill our personalities. That is how we end up ignorant of our own bodies, much like slaves were. But, today, progressive male minds rise up in defense of slaves. Imagine if in Interviú, instead of hot chicks, they showed illustrations of Blacks serving whites, showing their butts, of Black men, naked and covered in jam, of Black men scratching at their heads like monkeys... There would be such a strong backlash that it would put the magazine out of business. When the pictures show women, nobody cares. There is still a class discrepancy between Black people and women! The only group lower than white women are Black women.

They put our bodies on display but deny us the ability to truly understand them. Women generally know nothing of our own organs and their functions. Most women have given birth naive about the reproductive process occurring in their wombs. We are machines that they use to conceive and birth children while obscuring the act of creation inherent to our beings and to our reproductive apparatus. In this way, they try to convince us that the whole process of maternity is "natural." Supposedly, something grows within us, the product of love (in many cases, more likely of sadism and rape). We then painfully birth and love it.

By reducing women's will, annihilating our personalities, they get us to cleave to the male. Greek slaves also accepted their condition; they even fought and died for their masters. Women-servants must cease to be themselves (read: people), must be available at all times without anything of their own, without even their own sexuality.

The denial of our sexuality is another form of slavery. Women's sexuality is submission to male desires. We are not allowed desires of our own, and they'll castrate us as deterrence. In some countries, they remove the clitoris; in our civilization, the amputation is psychological. The vagina's privilege, they've established, is simply to accept being overpowered in coitus, satisfying the sexual partner's will, and maternity as a consequence. Male sexuality thus revolves around an act of sadism rooted in the female's masochistic compliance. Women's desires, if they exist, must be vaginal, which is to say, passive (despite frustrations and frigidity). Male sexual arousal depends on female passivity, on the denial of female sexuality.

Our sex is a mystery to us. Only the gynecologist--often the only person who will ever see our genitals--knows its secrets. How many women have ever picked up a mirror and looked at the "forbidden region?" When we were little, they told us that it was sinful, something neither to see nor touch, a sort of treasure that must be kept hidden and untouchable, reserved for a man, or rather, for a penis.

This was how our body became a weapon of alienation, transformed into a stranger that we can neither know, nor control, nor take pleasure in. It assaults us like an enemy.

Men have sex. Even as boys, they touch and admire their "peepees." Later, they masturbate, even in groups, without hiding it. All men know that sex is a need they must satisfy. But they have convinced women that we are devoid of sex, that sexuality for us is a passive obligation and condescension, that we have no need for pleasure, and that we are merely the object of male pleasure, their ejaculation recipient.

Decent women--those relegated by society to the labor of reproduction--and prostitutes--those relegated by the same society to the labor of pleasure--are two sides of the same coin, of the same institution, in which women lack their own sexuality, much like slaves.

The relationship between free man and slave--as between man and woman--is one of ownership. The free man owned slaves naturally, without any sort of conflict. Women can also be sold, bought, and even have our lives taken. But society camouflages this truth. Women seem free. Supposedly, they've already given us many rights, and the despotism of the pater familia and his arbitrary domination over us no longer exist. The bourgeoisie changes and adapts systems to its needs. Just as political reform towards a "bourgeois democracy" was needed--it no longer being convenient for Spain to remain under the rule of a totalitarian dictator--so has it become expedient to try to bring women's status into line with the system of universal change.

Divorce as an escape from marriage, the limitation of the father's power in favor of the state's power, the recognition of certain political rights for women, etc.--these changes result from the need to adapt family structures to the current capitalist State. In this system, everything must pass the tests of Reason and Value.

We seem free, though nothing could be farther from the truth. A long time ago, Marxism demystified the concept of proletariat freedom from the legal and bourgeois perspective. But a member of the proletariat is an individual, a man, a father. Women do not exist, even if they enable the existence of men. Though they may proclaim our liberty, we remain tied to an invisible world; we can (or, in our case, will be able to) get divorced, but we still have to marry in the first place. We lack identities of our own. Our identities are those of our fathers or husbands, who relate to us as owners. We must accept the role imposed on us by infinite paters: paternity, patronage, patriotism, patrimony, patriarch, patriarchy. The shared linguistic root--it unmasks their shared meaning and shared power dynamic.

To own slaves is to appropriate not just their labor power, but also their will. That was how masters on all sides of the Greek world mobilized their slaves for war. Slaves participated actively in wars and conflicts where their own collective interests did not factor in at all. During a military crisis, the slaves frequently were freed, recruited to the army or marines, and called to fight. The result was that some slaves were freed while the institution itself continued, the same as before, and slavery remained untouchable.

Some slaves fought for their masters, a still-meaningful enigma. There is nothing so difficult to comprehend as the psychology of a slave. Even when--as is the case in America--there seems to be a great deal of material (autobiographies of ex-slaves, impressions of travelers from non-slaveholding societies, etc.), no credible theory emerges. Barely any information has survived from ancient times, and it is all indirect, marginal, and not especially transparent. With so little material to draw from, it is easy to posit that, except for cases like Sparta, the historical record shows no slave revolts nor information about uprisings. Even if we accept the evidence--and the nature of the sources justifies scepticism--the conclusion is not logical at all.

Slaves' alienation was overwhelming. The The Economics says that a slave's life consisted of three elements: work, punishment, and food. Across Greek literature, there are too many beatings and even torture.

Our known history is built upon the exploitation of women, just as Greek history was built upon the exploitation of slaves. Society is founded on our specific work. The homemaker works for food, with no salary, like a slave, and blows and beatings have persisted as commonplace throughout time.

"It is a mistake to think that the threat of rebellion increases automatically with the increase of suffering and oppression. Hunger and torture kill the spirit; everything else spurs on efforts to flee or other forms of completely individualistic behavior (including betrayal of colleagues), while a revolt requires organization, courage, and consistency." Frederick Douglass who, in the year 1855, penned the most incisive analysis ever written by a slave, summarized slave psychology like this: "Beat and cuff your slave, keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog."

Deep psychological conditioning produces the bond between slave and master and between woman and man. We can look to thousands of sad cases as examples. The phenomenon is, in equal measures, infuriating and common: a woman who remains loyal to her husband and excuses his behavior despite his abuse. Because of how we are taught and the lives we live, women are often deprived of agency and subsumed in the highest possible degree of alienation.

Throughout history, much like slaves, we've acted and participated in conflicts that have nothing to do with our own condition. Under the influence of illusions and false promises, women help to bring about political change, convinced that their circumstances will also change as a result. The longest running scam in history! Just as our body must lack independent sexuality to submit to male desire, our will must be rendered totally impotent to convince us--even the more progressive among us--that we can liberate ourselves by supporting the masters' revolts. We must be mad to gather and unite at the edges of their organizations and their parties, and with other criteria. But there is more still. Like the Greek slaves, we are not just deployed in their conflicts, but also used as the basis upon which they develop the other contradiction: the rich-poor contradiction in the Greek era or the bourgeoisie-proletariat contradiction in the present day.

Of all the forms of protest available to slaves, the most common was escape. The runaway slave was a chronic phenomenon, quite usual in Greek cities. Today, the most significant way for women to rebel is to break our marriage bonds. Separations happen all the time and are almost exclusively sought by women. One might interpret this act as an individual revolt, but it also results from the existence of women's groups, of feminist associations that denounce oppression and help--even if only psychologically--to liberate the thousands of women who flee from oppressive and alienating conditions each day. There is a whole social framework that women are creating little by little and a liberation consciousness that circulates, facilitating many women's breakups. Separation is not, then, simply an individual revolt. Feminists mustn't interpret it that way. The trend already poses a serious threat to systemic equilibrium. If they hadn't been astute and integrationist enough to legalize divorce and deescalate the threat, marital rupture could have toppled the system.

Between slave and master and woman and man, relations of production are characterized by personal, not contractual, dependence. This reality leads to dominion over the person herself. For a worker, it is their labor power that gets exploited; for a woman, it is her person.

Exchange and value, which are the social bonds in a capitalist society, demand a contract between boss and paid employee, consent between the parties that implies freedom and equality. It is the system of bourgeois democracy, which must submit everything to the rule of reason and value. Rationalist bourgeois thought dictates that each individual is equal to all others and is free. But this abstract individual is a man. And this man does not fit the mold unless he owns private property, which includes his family, wife, and children. Possession of a woman and family allows a man to count as an individual with social rights in bourgeois society. Women are not individuals. The individual is the man, the head of house. Women must imbue men with existence, which is to say, give them status as economic subjects.

As women, we are excluded from the real world. We are excluded even from ourselves because, as instruments of production whose output belongs to others, we are fully dispossessed of what we produce and of our own persons. The owners are men. The world we are excluded from is the masculine world. And they exert dominion not only over our work, but also over our person, our will, our body, our sexuality...

Women do not receive salaries for our specific, mandatory work: being a good wife and a good mother. In a marriage, there is no contract between the partners to dictate the terms of labor hours, distribution of domestic tasks, or compensation. Legal marriage contracts regulate only the fate of shared property, ignoring all the labor undertaken in the home which, legally speaking, is null. The lack of value for the work itself arises from this nullity. Ours is stolen labor unregulated by anyone.

In general, no woman starts her marriage conscious of what she's gotten into. When establishing any other sort of legal contract, the parties must understand the clauses, the rights and responsibilities. When we get married, we do none of that. Marriage is the white dress, the gifts, the excitement, the most beautiful day of a woman's life, the passionate romanticism... We unconsciously play the part of the bride as established by the cultural norms at hand; we sign a paper that we do not read, more concerned with the immortalizing photo than the written promise. Flowers, kisses, nuptial parades, cake, and champagne. The trap was consummated.

In any case, the signature on the paper only regulates the fate of the patrimony. It says nothing about future work. It does not say how many children she is required to give the man (the language is all too revealing: people say, "the woman gave him four children"--they are a gift, freely given), how many hours of the day and night she must work, how many times she's required to sleep with her husband, when she will be able to have free time to herself, when she can go out, what money she will have for her expenses, etc. Speaking of these matters is not the done thing. What is needed from her is love, total and selfless submission. We are trained to develop specific and exclusive skills that allow us to be extraordinarily loving mothers and self-effacing wives, which facilitates the secular theft of feminine work.

This is how, reduced to our gynoecium, alienated from the public domain, we lose all awareness of our own labor's value. In a society where money determines value, ours is not strictly speaking a job. To have a valued job that allows us to pay for what we do at home, we must also work outside the home, increasing our number of labor hours and concerns, entering into a permanent contradiction between the two roles and distinct mentalities that we jump through hoops to satisfy, like circus animals. Either we abandon our homes and our children or the responsibility of outside work.

The value of a woman's work is shrinking by the day. But the family, as an economic unit, is fundamental to society and serves as a stabilizing force. It was the same in ancient Greece, where the exploitation of slave labor was the dominant relation of production, and Athens' political and military power rested upon it.

Though society tries to ignore or erase any feature that exposes female slavery, no woman can free herself from her position, be it wife or sexual object. Men's discernment between different types of female "slaves" is comparable to the Greeks' differentiation between captured slaves (or their descendents) and purchased ones. A quote by the historian Theopompus says that the quios , who were innovators in slave purchasing, received divine punishment. Purchasing sex acts, prostitutes, is also frowned upon socially or religiously. It is better to use a legitimate woman, yours by right.

Just as the Greeks took for granted that slavery was a reality of human existence, men consider female enslavement normal and integral to our daily lives; Plato and Aristotle justified slavery in Greece the same way Marxists justify women's status. The female-male contradiction is unrecognized in current society or, at best, is considered secondary. And let us be honest, reformist friends: believing that the liberation of the oppressed class, the proletariat, will bring about female liberation is as absurd as believing that the revolution of the poor would have brought about the liberation of slaves, including the poor men's own.

Through comparative reasoning, one can prove that women are slaves. Look to our comprehensive loss of humanity, the a priori dispossession of all that we produce, the randomness to which we are subjected, the disposition of our lives and of our deaths, and the resulting impotence to which we find our will reduced.

Slaves could reclaim their virility--which is to say, their liberty--giving them certain esteem. Women's revindications generally yield only laughter.

We affirm that we are slaves, but find the term wanting. A man can become a slave and can also free himself, but we are and will always remain women. For this reason, besides 'slavery,' we have to add another term that explains the biological nature of our condition. It is, as I said in the beginning, 'caste.' No biological or natural basis exists, in contrast, for the concepts of slavery or class.

Due to the complexity of our domination--rooted both in physical characteristics assigned at birth and in our socially-constructed status as slaves--women's liberation addresses all existing forms of oppression. We are, then, a fundamental and decisive revolutionary force, so radical that we need, alongside the subversion of relations of production, a profound change in the structure of individual relationships. Women, as an autonomous force, can simultaneously revindicate the material relationships that underlie our exploitation and men's position as patriarchs, parents, patrons--in short, their power.