Sunday, November 17, 2013

* Chilldbirth is like "shitting a pumpkin." Shulamith Firestone


"' Unless revolution uproots the basic social organization, the biological family ---the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled  --- the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated," Firestone wrote. She elaborated with characeteristic bluntness: 'Pregnancy is barbaric'; childbirth is 'like shitting a pumpkin'; and childhood is 'a supervised nightmare.'
She went on: 
'Feminists have to questionNnot just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature. Many women give up in despair; if that's how deep it goes they don't want to know.' "  ( The New Yorker, p. 54)


Shulamith Firestone
The Dialectic of Sex

Excerpted from
"Death of a Revolutionary"
by Susan Faludi
The New Yorker, April 15, 2013

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