However, it is within her discussion of pornography that she first uses the phrase “the straight mind,” which “develops a totalizing interpretation of history, social reality, culture, language, and all the subjective phenomena at the same time… tendency to immediately universalize its production of concepts into general laws which claim to hold true to all societies, all epochs, all individuals” (27). Wittig’s example of such violence (in her 1980 essay) is that of pornography, an analysis which has been addressed in much more complex ways than how she addresses it: to Wittig, all pornography demonstrates the oppression of women by men within a heterosexual economy. Further, in her indictment of (French) psychoanalytic theory, she importantly observes that in the midst of such theoretical work, “we forget the material (physical) violence that they directly do to the oppressed people” (25). To Wittig, the primary failing of Marxism was its failure to see individual subjects historically situated: “It is we who must undertake the task of defining the individual subject in materialist terms” (19). By defining “woman” in political terms, Wittig wishes to dissociate “‘women’ (the class within which we fight) and ‘woman,’ the myth” (15), and subsequently “suppress men as a class… a political struggle” (15). The only response to such an entrenched regime is nothing short of the political, philosophical, and symbol destruction of the categories of “men” and “women” (xiiv-xiv). In what Wittig characterizes as a materialist lesbian approach to heterosexuality, she “describe heterosexuality not as an institution but as a political regime which rests on the submission and the appropriation of women,” a regime from which there is no escape (xiiv).
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