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But that was the way the world was, and I was not prepared to question it. Then I got out of school, and I was alone with myself in my studio for five years. That was a very important time, because during that time I was in the process of creating myself, defining myself, and that meant my ego was of central importance. I was the one who was important. What I felt, what I believed, the way I saw the world, those were the things I used and dealt with every day.  Every day I walked out of my studio and saw women on the billboards with their tits stuck up and their ass stuck out, and there was a direct contradiction between what I was discovering about myself and the image that I kept coming up against outside my studio. And I had a whole series of hassles over the years, enormous hassles with men in the power structure, and I sort of knew, yeah, they don't dig women too much, there are hardly any women artists. Still not understanding what that meant, until one day, it dawned on me, that the way in which my work was perceived was totally conditioned by the facts that I had not wanted to accept, all the facts that existed in the society; that is, 1) Women are not important. We live in a male-oriented society, men are more important than women. The entire structure of our society is based on the idea that men are more important, and you can see it in two very evident ways. 1) Names: the most degrading thing you can say about a man is that he's Mister Judy Gerowitz. But nobody gets up tight at all if I'm called by my husband's name; that's perfectly OK, because my ego is not important, only his ego is important. And for you to really understand that--if you're a male--is to try and imagine how you would feel about being called by your girl friend's name. And those feelings that you would have are the feelings that you ask every woman to accept without even thinking about it; which means that you do not even recognize her humanity, you don't even recognize her ego. That's what's so terrible, if you were doing it on purpose there'd be some--you know...hope. But what we're talking about, what I'm talking about are the ways in which we function without ever giving it a second thought, the assumptions we make, the ways in which men deal with women and we deal with each other, without ever thinking about it. 

The other way you can see this whole thing operating about needs is in our sexual attitudes. Twenty years ago, in sexual books and, you know, marriage manuals and all that stuff, even ten years ago I remember; ten