Femininity versus androgyny in The Medusa's Laughter and A Room of One's Own There is much debate in feminist circles about the "best" way to liberate women through writing . Some argue that a writer should, in an effort to regain her stolen identity, attack her oppressive influences and embrace her femininity, simultaneously fostering dimorphic literary, linguistic, and social arenas. Others argue that the feminization of writing pigeons women into an artistic slave morality, a mentality that expends creative energy on battle and not production, and inefficiently overturns stereotypes and foments positive social change; rather, one should lose gender self-consciousness and write androgynously. Hélène Cixous and Virginia Woolf, in "The Laughter of the Medusa" and "A Room of One's Own," respectively, embody these opposing ideologies, highlighting different historical sources for women's persecution literature, theorizing divergent plans for the advancement of women, and stylistically mirroring the their ideas. Ultimately, the main difference lies in the time frame of each philosophy and the belief in how much influence writing has in “empowering,” to borrow a current feminist buzzword. For Cixous, female writing goes hand in hand with women's liberation: «Writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursor movement of a transformation of social structures and cultural" (311). . Woolf, however, sees women's writing as emblematic of and dependent on the advancement of women in general; only with "a room of her own and five hundred pounds a year," through widespread social change, his imaginary Mary Carmichael "will be a poet" (94). One of Cixous's main intentions is "to destroy, to destroy" (309). ). This destruction of injustice colors his entire perspective; much of his essay is dedicated to reaction, to the overthrow of the tyranny of men. Men's writing, she argues, "is a place where the repression of women has been perpetuated, again and again, more or less consciously, and … has grossly exaggerated all signs of sexual opposition" (311). Cixous compares women's self-image to that of disenfranchised blacks: "They can be taught that their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark. The darkness it is dangerous… And so we have internalized this horror of darkness” (310). Through these cultural judgments, men "have made women an anti-narcissism!... They have constructed the infamous logic of anti-love" (310). She links this anti-love most strongly with self-loathing of the body: "We have been distanced from our bodies, we have been shamefully taught to ignore them, to target them with that stupid sexual modesty" (315).