This Sex which Is not One Women on the market provided the standard of value for commodities, and into com- of her body-although her body constitutes the material sup- modity-objects that ensured the circulation of exchange with- port of that price out participating in it as subjects. But when women are exchanged, womans body must be eated as an abstraction. The exchange operation cannot take place in terms of some intrinsic, immanent value of the com- modity. It can only come about when two objects-two wom en-are in a relation of equality with a third term that is neither Let us now reconsider a few points in Marx's analysis of the one nor the other. It is thus not as "women"that they are value that seem to describe the social status of women xchange, but as women reduced to some common feature- their current price in gold, or phalluses-and of which they Wealth amounts to a subordination of the use of things to would represent a plus or minus quantity. Not a plus or a minu their accumulation. Then would the way women are used matter of feminine qualities, obviously. Since these qualities are aba less than their number? The possession of a woman is certainly doned in the long run to the needs of the consumer, woman h indispensable to man for the reproductive use value that she value on the market by virtue of one single quality: that of being a represents; but what he desires is to have them all. To"accu- product of nulate" them, to be able to count off his conquests, seductions On this basis, each one looks exactly like every other. They possessions, both sequentially and cumulatively, as measure or all have the same phantom-like reality. Metamorphosed standard(s) identical sublimations, samples of the same indistinguishable All but one? For if the series could be closed, value might work, all these objects now manifest just one thing, namely well lie, as Marx says, in the relation among them rather than in that in their production a force of human labor has been ex- the relation, to a standard that remains external to them- pended, that labor has accumulated in them. In their role as whether gold or phallus crystals of that common social substance, they are deemed to The use made of women is thus of less value than their appro- priation one by one. And their usefulness"is not what counts the most. Womans price is not determined by the"properties' As commodities, women are thus two things at once: utilitarian objects and bearers of value. "They manifest th ves therefore as commodities, or have the form of commodities, only in so far as they have two forms, a physical or natural form, and a value form”(p.55) WiL lin ge o i rede rick ing s, erer. Eist: ur nn(New York But "the reality of the value of commodities differs in this ept the question, t be addressed also, and in the first respect from Dame Quickly, that we dont know where to have it'(ibid. ).Woman, object of exchange, differs from worman, to Marx, determine the relation of form to matter by analogy with etween masculine and feminine? ro use value, in that one doesn't know how to take (hold of her, for between the sexes would amount instead, then, to going back since "the value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter 175