Going Too Far (18 page)

Students for a Democratic Society, until recently male dominated in action as well as male supremacist in attitude, passed their first resolution on the Women's Movement in December 1968, at their Ann Arbor National Conference. The statement, which takes almost no notice of the social, sexual, or emotional valences of women's oppression, nevertheless is very cogent on the economic aspects, and how they relate, ultimately, to revolutionary commitment:

The inability of the most advanced, technologically developed, etc. capitalist society to provide equality to [more than] half its citizens not only exposes the thorough hypocrisy of all that society's words about “justice” and “equality.” It also shows that the struggle for equality of women is a revolutionary task.… Male supremacy in the Movement mirrors male supremacy in the capitalist society. [This fact] raises the issue that although no people's liberation can happen without a socialist revolution in this country, a socialist revolution could take place which maintains the secondary position of women in society.… The fight for Women's Liberation is a concretization of the struggle of all peoples from oppression.… Therefore, the liberation of women must become a conscious part of our struggle.

We have, indeed, seen the erosion of women's position in the Soviet Union, and heard rumors of the same development in Algeria and even in Cuba. The day comes when women who fought and died on the barricades as bravely as men are told, “That phase is over, comrade. Back to the kitchen.” Hell no, we won't go.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, the newly articulated demands of such a vast constituency are proving revolutionary. What we must all learn, this time, is
not
to repeat history, not to copy the ego-tripping of many male-movement “nonleaders,” not to gain control in order to manipulate and exploit others as they have us, but rather to seize power over our own lives by any means necessary, including
force of arms, and
then
to begin the Revolution—in our minds, hearts, guts, culture, daily lives.
That
is the difficult task: to create a truly free society. Imperialism begins at home. The Revolution begins at home.

“
The Revolution Made Flesh
”

How relatively simple the economics seem when compared to the cultural, psychological, emotional, and sexual problems.
Naturally
no one should lack medical care or food or shelter or the pleasures of challenging work (as opposed to debilitating toil, which technology is ready to assume).

But why are we ready to reject most values of a depraved society, while still clinging to others? How pervasive the puritanical conditioning must have been, to make us still afraid of our naked bodies, to still fear the mystery of the opposite sex, and to be even more terrified of the familiarity of our own sex in someone else's body! Movement men who in one breath declare that the whole political structure must be torn down, in the next breath will play their male-mystique roles to the full (cuff women, talk heavy, and
never
embrace another man except in a locker-room parody of affection). Movement women, especially those into women's rights, are used to having commie-dirty-punk-creep epithets thrown at them; they just chuckle. But whisper “lesbian” and they will cringe in agonized denial. And of what? Of the natural bisexuality in all of us? Intelligent people who have read their Freud and Jung and Norman O. Brown and Masters and Johnson as well as their Marx, Marcuse, Mao, and Guevara, still flinch at the thought of a revolution in sexual mores.

Surely no one dare call oneself a revolutionary unless a continual attempt is made to create a revolution in one's own psyche—the ongoing struggle toward the deepening of one's humanity. Any acid trip will teach you that, as it will prove the silly absurdity of emphasis on purely genitally oriented sex, and the natural order of what could only be termed omnisexuality.

Yet so basic a scientific revelation as that in
Human Sexual Response
(Masters and Johnson), talking about the
one
female orgasm—the clitorally based one—has hardly dented consciousness two years after the publication of the best-seller. Nor has Anne Koedt's feminist paper, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” had any greater effect, although it makes the ramifications of this revelation even clearer. “The myths remain,” wrote Sue Lydon in
Ramparts
(December 14, 1968), “because a male-dominated American culture has a vested interest in this continuance. Before Masters and Johnson, men defined female sexuality in a way as favorable to themselves as possible.” That is, a woman
must receive her sexual satisfaction only as a concomitant of a man's seeking his.

While the myth of the vaginal orgasm managed to thoroughly frustrate generations of women up until Masters and Johnson's liberating discovery (because one cannot achieve what is physically impossible—so what's wrong with
you
), the earlier Victorians were at least honest about their sexual repression. Women weren't supposed to have orgasms at all—and one Dr. Isaac Brown Baker, suspecting that some women were getting uppity and daring to enjoy themselves, performed numerous clitoridectomies, claiming that sexual excitement in women led to insanity, catalepsy, and epileptic seizures.

Depraved, of course, yet no more so than modern legislators who refuse to change perverted laws about natural behavior. Food, shelter, medicine—these are inalienable rights, hardly revolutionary demands. Yet even as we require these obvious rights, we must also have truly revolutionary goals: for a whole new concept of sexuality, for a new definition of what a woman is, what a man is; for the gentle laying to rest of limiting monosexuality; for joy and fun and freedom.

An examination of the structure of the bourgeois family and the mental price it has extracted is causing many people to think more and more in terms of the communal family, where children are raised by men as well as by women, and by more than one pair; where parenthood is perhaps a biological fact but not a property-defined relationship. Where else do we first learn the dynamics of domination but in the family triangle of our culture in which the woman is treated as a distinct inferior? Therefore, to eliminate political and economic domination, we must simultaneously uproot sexual domination from that microcosm where the developing individual's view of human possibility is irrevocably formed. Marriage as a bourgeois institution is beginning to fade slowly but surely from the needs of the under-twenty-five-year-olds. No more need the bride be passed from her father to her husband in order to produce (let's face it) sons. No more need the mother possess her children to death, since she will have, in fact, something of herself to call her own.

Nor does this relate to the myth of the sexual revolution. There is no such thing yet—for women. Rather, the double standard exists more powerfully and hypocritically than ever, among radicals and hippies as well as straights. A sexually free girl is still a lay whom guys can exchange stories about, while a girl who might
not
“want to” with just any man is considered hung-up—she has the Pill, so what's stopping her? (Conceivably, a sense of distaste.)

Surely it is because women have for so long been regarded merely as objects for sex and reproduction that we have learned to scrutinize those areas of our culture with particular suspicion. It was Margaret
Mead (whose work was held for a period in disrepute by her male contemporaries, but is now being reexamined by younger anthropologists) who first studied how permissive sexual mores in “primitive” cultures informed those societies with unique strength and survival values. Morgan, Lévi-Strauss, Montague, and Benedict have also investigated this theme. Serious anthropologists (as opposed to reactionary popularizers of a pseudo-scientific ethology, like Ardrey, Fox, and Tiger) continue to turn up examples which prove that competitive, aggressive cultures are those in which sexual stereotypes are most polarized, while those social structures allowing for an overlap of roles and functions between men and women tend to be collectivist, cooperative, and peaceful.

As women, our past has been taken from us. Our present is confused, our future uncertain. The very semantics of the language reflect our condition. We do not even have our own names, but bear that of the father until we exchange it for that of the husband. We have no word for what we are unless it be an auxiliary term for the opposite: man/wo-man, male/fe-male. No one, including us, knows who we really are.

But we are now pledged to find out, to create new selves if necessary, in a process as revolutionary as giving birth to one's own soul. And that process is inextricably bound up with liberating our brothers, as well, from sick sexual codes and from the enslavement of
being
the master. It must begin now, this re-creation. No waiting until after the revolution.

Humankind has polluted the air and water and land of our planet; we have all but destroyed ourselves by the twin suicidal weapons of overkill and overbreeding. The famine is upon us, the cities are in flames, our sisters and brothers all over the world are locked in a struggle with the dragon that is imperialism. It is for us in America, the dragon's lair, to put
every
priority of oppression first, to fight on every front for human dignity, to burn our way out of the dragon's gut while our comrades hack away at its scaly exterior, until the beast is dead, and we rise in joy, a woman and a man, phoenix from its ashes.

Spring
1969

¹
A reference to Dr. Benjamin Spock, then active in the anti-war movement, and only as late as 1976 publicly criticized as a male supremacist by Jane Spock, his former wife and unacknowledged co-author.

²
Ethel Romm,
New York
magazine, October 14, 1968.

³
Voice
of the Women's Liberation Movement
(newsletter).

BARBAROUS RITUALS

During much of 1968, all of 1969, and most of 1970, I was preoccupied with compiling and editing
Sisterhood is Powerful
: the first anthology of writings from the Women's Liberation Movement. I wrote in the Introduction to
Sisterhood
: “This book is an action … all of us who worked on it in a variety of ways had to read and think and talk about the condition of women until we began to dream about the subject, literally. The suffering and courage and humor and rage and intelligence and endurance that spilled out from the pages that came in from different women! … The history we learned, the political sophistication we discovered, the insights into our own lives that dawned on us! I couldn't believe—still can't—how angry I could become, from deep down and way back, something like a five-thousand-year buried anger.”

“Barbarous Rituals” was written out of that anger, as a shorthand encoding of some basic themes in the educational conditioning of a woman in Western “civilization.” It was almost an afterthought to the anthology, a piece which nevertheless demanded inclusion. I wrote it as an outline of my own memories, fears, dreaded expectations, and fury, expanded to encompass the experiences of as many sisters' lives as I could imagine. I didn't sign the piece because (I claimed) it might look nepotistic; this excuse, because of a deplorable tendency on the part of some anthologists to allot themselves the lion's share of their own collections. But the real reason I assumed the cloak of anonymity was that I feared to own up to authorship of a piece which confessed such rage, such consciousness, such vulnerability about concrete details of my own life. Even when women's reactions proved the piece to be one of the most popular in the book, I kept my secret. Intellectually I knew my condition was shared by all other women; emotionally I just evaded acknowledging the article.

The time has come, I think, to claim the orphan for my own, in love and in pride. I reprint it here for that purpose and because the writing of it, even if I could not admit as much publicly at that time, constituted for me a major commitment to feminism. It seems to me now such an obvious
little article. Why then has it taken me so long to sign my name to its truths?

After all, elsewhere in the same anthology I stated in a brave although still tentative voice, “More and more, I begin to think of a worldwide Women's Revolution as the only hope for life on this planet.”

Indeed.

W
OMAN
I
S
:

—kicking strongly in your mother's womb, upon which she is told, “It must be a boy if it's so active!”

—being tagged with a
pink
beaded bracelet thirty seconds after you are born, and wrapped in
pink
blankets five minutes thereafter.

—being confined to the Doll Corner in nursery school when you are really fascinated by Tinker Toys.

—wanting to wear overalls instead of “frocks.”

—learning to detest the words “dainty” and “cute.”

—being labeled a tomboy when all you wanted to do was climb that tree to look out and see a distance.

—learning to sit with your legs crossed, even when your feet can't touch the floor yet.

—hating boys—because they're allowed to do things you want to do but are forbidden to—and being told hating boys is a phase.

—learning that something you do is “naughty,” but when your brother does the same thing, it's “spunky.”

—wondering why your father gets mad now and then, but your mother mostly sighs a lot.

—seeing grownups chuckle when you say you want to be an engineer or doctor when you grow up—and learning to say you want to be a mommy or a nurse, instead.

—wanting to shave your legs at twelve and being agonized because your mother won't let you.

—being agonized at fourteen because you finally have shaved your legs, and your flesh is on fire.

—being told nothing whatsoever about menstruation, so that you think you are bleeding to death with your first period,
or