Woman Hating (7 page)

“Us” —who are we? Jerry Rubin says that we are the Children of Amerika. Eldridge Cleaver calls us the Children of BLOOD. It is our parents, Amerika, BLOOD, who through their moral bankruptcy and genocidal ways have forced us from the womb onto the streets of the nation. It is our parents, Amerika, BLOOD, whom we refuse to be, whose work we refuse to do. We are the survivors of Flower Power, now adult, with our own children. We are the tribes of Woodstock Nation, now in Diaspora, roaming the whole earth. We are the New Left, wounded, in disarray. We are not yet extinct, and we are not nearly finished. Our past is only prologue.

Generally we are between 24 and 35 years old; have used acid, mescaline, psilocibin, etc., with some frequency; use grass and hashish often with no mystification; have probably used cocaine, amphetamines, or barbiturates at some time; have frequent sexual relations, many of which are absolutely casual; reject the nuclear family and seek forms of community antagonistic to it. We are the people who listened to Leary, Ginsberg, Bruce. Politically we are radicals. Some of us seek to develop radical forms of community, to live good, simple, natural lives. Some of us engage in explicitly political actions —opposing illegitimate wars, resisting the uses of illegitimate authority —we wonder how to kill pigs without becoming pigs, we are immersed in the
process
of revolution, we learn the skills of revolution, we resist all forms of current authority and we simultaneously seek to develop alternatives to those forms. There are diminishing numbers of peace freaks among us (totally committed to nonviolent revolution) and quite a few roaring anarchists. We are, at least in our Amerikan manifestation, white, children of privilege, children of liberals and reformists. We were brought up in pretty, clean homes, had lots of privacy, friends, companionship from family and peers. We are unbelievably well educated —we went to fine suburban schools (mostly public) where we experienced physical and intellectual regimentation which we found unbearable; we went to the best colleges and universities (mostly private) where we studied anthropology, Freud, Marx, Norman O. Brown, and Marcuse too, with the finest minds who, it turned out, were chicken shit when it came to applying egalitarian principles in the classroom or outside of it. The universities where we studied all of these disembodied ideas continued doing defense work for the Amerikan government. We have had our share of disaster and despair: the acid tragedies, the Weatherman tragedies, the needle tragedies. Many of us have known jail, and we have all seen friends die. We are older than we ever thought we would be.

What it comes down to is this: through the use of drugs, through sexual living out, through radical political action, we broke through the bourgeois mental sets which were our inheritance but retained the humanism crucial to the liberalism of our parents. Our goals are simple enough to understand: we want to humanize the planet, to break down the national structures which separate us as people, the corporate structures which separate us into distinct classes, the racist structures which separate us according to skin color; to conserve air, water, life in its many forms; to create communities which are more than habitable—communities in which people are free, in which people have what they need, in which groups of people do not accumulate power, or money, or goods, through the exploitation of other people. So when we look at a sex newspaper, made by people like us, we demand that it take some positive step in the direction we want to go: we demand that it incorporate our radical attitudes, the knowledge that acid and other parts of our lifestyle have given us. And, most importantly, we refuse to permit it to reinforce the dual-role sexist patterns and consciousness of this culture, the very patterns and consciousness which oppress us as women, which enslave us as human beings.

Suck
is a typical counter-culture sex paper. Any analysis of it reveals that the sexism is all-pervasive, expressed primarily as sadomasochism, absolutely the same as, and not counter to, the parent cultural values.
Suck
claims to be an ally. It is crucial to demonstrate that it is not.

The first issue of
Suck
appeared in Amsterdam, Holland, in 1969. It continues to be printed in Amsterdam because Dutch police do not confiscate pornography or imprison pornographers. It was started by two Amerikan expatriates.
Suck
is entirely about sex, that is, its pages contain pornographic fiction, technical sexual advice (how to suck cock or cunt, for instance), letters from readers which reveal personal sexual histories (mostly celebrational), and photographs of cunt, cock, fucking, sucking, and group orgying. The newspaper appears irregularly —when there is enough money and material for publication.
Suck
is confiscated in England and France with some vigor.

Suck
has made positive contributions. Sucking is approached in a new way. Sucking cock, sucking cunt, how to, how good. Sperm tastes good, so does cunt. In particular, the emphasis on sucking cunt serves to demystify cunt in a spectacular way —cunt is not dirty, not terrifying, not smelly and foul; it is a source of pleasure, a beautiful part of female physiology, to be seen, touched, tasted.

The taboo against sucking goes very deep. Most of the actual laws against cocksucking and cuntsucking relate to prohibitions against any sexual activity that does not lead to, or is not performed for the purpose of effecting, impregnation. Sucking as an act leading to orgasm places the nature of sexual contact clearly — sex is the coming together of people for pleasure. The value is in the coming together. Marriage does not sanctify that coming together, procreation is not its goal.
Suck
treats sucking as an act of the same magnitude as fucking. That attitude, pictures of women sucking cock, men sucking cunt, and all the vice versas, discussions of the techniques of sucking, all break down barriers to the realization of a full sexuality.

Cunnilingus and fellatio (sucking by any other name ... ) are still crimes. The antifellatio laws, in conjunction with sodomy laws, are sometimes used against male homosexuals (lesbians are not taken seriously enough to be prosecuted). Given the selective enforcement of the laws, the shame that attaches to the forbidden acts, and the fact that acts of oral lovemaking represented in words or in pictures are generally deemed obscene, sucking must be seen in and of itself as an act of political significance (which is certainly wonderful news for depressed revolutionaries). In this instance
Suck
takes a relevant, respectable stand.

(Important digression. As late as October 1961, Lenny Bruce was arrested because in one of his routines he used the verb “to come" and talked about cock-sucking. He was arrested for the
crime
of obscenity. Bruce described the bust:

I was arrested for obscenity in San Francisco for using a ten letter word which is sort of chic. I’m not going to repeat the word tonite. It starts with a “c. ” They said it was vernacular for a favorite homosexual practice — which is weird, cause I don't relate that word to homosexuals. It relates to any contemporary woman I know or would know or would love or would marry.
¹

Bruce was busted in San Francisco (obscenity), Philadelphia (possession), Los Angeles (possession), Hollywood (obscenity), Chicago (obscenity), and not permitted to enter England or Australia. As late as 1964 Bruce was busted for obscenity in New York City, in 1965 he was declared a legally bankrupt pauper, and on August 3, 1966, he died in Los Angeles. )

Suck
also makes a contribution in printing pictures of cunt, though here the praise must be severely qualified. Photos of cunt are rare. All the rest we have seen — siliconed tits, leering smiles,
Playboy's
version of pubic hair. But having seen a remarkable movie by Anne Severson and Shelby Kennedy
²
in which a fixed camera catalogues the cunts of many different women, all ages, races, with all sorts of sexual experience, one gets a comprehension of the superficiality of the
Suck
cunt photos. Imagine a catalogue of still photos of people’s faces —the colors, textures, indentations, the unique character of each. It is the same with cunts, and it would be fine if
Suck
would show us that. It does not.

Germaine Greer once wrote for
Suck —
she was an editor—and her articles, the token women’s articles, were sometimes strong; her voice was always authentic. Her attempt was to bring women into closer touch with unaltered female sexuality and place that sexuality clearly, unapologetically, within the realm of humanity: women, not as objects, but as human beings, truly a revolutionary concept.

But Greer has another side which allies itself with the worst of male chauvinism and it is that side which, I believe, made her articles acceptable to
Suck's
editors and
Suck
acceptable to her. In an interview in the Amerikan
Screw,
reprinted in
Suck
under the tide “Germaine: ‘I am a Whore, ’ ” she stated:

Ideally, you’ve got to the stage where you really could ball everyone —the fat, the blind, the foolish, the impotent, the dishonest.

We have to rescue people who are already dead. We have to make love to people who are dead, and that’s not easy.
³

Here is the ever popular notion that women, extending our role as sex object, can humanize an atrophied world. The notion is based on a false premise. Just as the pill was supposed to liberate women by liberating us sexually, i. e., we could fuck as freely as men, fucking is supposed to liberate women and men too. But the pill served to reinforce our essential bondage —it made us more accessible, more open to exploitation. It did not change our basic condition because it did nothing to challenge the sexist structure of society, not to mention conventional sexual relationships and couplings. Neither does promiscuity per se. Greer’s alliance with the sexual revolution is, sadly but implicitly, an alliance with male chauvinism because it does not speak to the basic condition of women which remains the same if we fuck one man a week, or twenty.

There is similar misunderstanding in this statement:

Well, listen, this is one of the things a woman has to understand, and I get a bit impatient sometimes with women who can’t see it. A woman, after all, in this country is a commodity. She’s a status symbol, and the prettier she is the more expensive, the more difficult to attain. Anyone can have a fat old lady. But young girls with clear eyes are not for the 40-year-old man who’s been working as a packer or a storeman all his life. So that when he sees her he snarls, mostly I think, because she’s not available to him. She’s another taunt, and yet another index of how the American dream is not his to have. He never had a girl like that and he never will.

Now, I think that the most sensible way for us to see the crime of rape is an act of aggression against this property symbol... (but I’m not sure about this at all —I mean, I think it’s also aggression against the mother who fucks up so many people’s lives). And I must think that as a woman, who has not done a revolution, have not put myself on the barricade on this question, I owe it to my poor brothers not to get uptight. Because I am that, I am a woman they could never hope to ball, and in the back of my mind I reject them too.
⁴

Here again, the alliance is with male chauvinism, and it is incomprehensible. Mothers fuck up people’s lives in direct proportion to how fucked up their own lives are — that fuck up is the role they must play, the creative possibilities they must abort. Greer surely knows that and must speak to it. Women who walk, as opposed to those who take taxis or drive (another relevant class distinction), are constantly harassed, often threatened with violence, often violated. That is the situation which is the daily life of women.

It is true, and very much to the point, that women are objects, commodities, some deemed more expensive than others —but it is only by asserting one’s humanness every time, in all situations, that one becomes someone as opposed to something. That, after all, is the core of our struggle.

Rape, of course, does have its apologists. Norman Mailer posits it, along with murder, as the content of heroism. It is, he tells us in
The Presidential Papers, morally superior to masturbation. Eldridge Cleaver tells us that it is an act of political rebellion — he “practiced” on Black women so that he could rape white women better. Greer joins the mystifying chorus when she posits rape as an act of aggression against property (a political anticapitalist action no less) and suggests that it might also be an act of psychological rebellion against the ominous, and omnipresent, mother.
^*
Rape is, in fact, simple straightforward heterosexual behavior in a male-dominated society. It offends us when it does, which is rarely, only because it is male-female relation without sham —without the mystifying romance of the couple, without the civility of a money exchange. It happens in the home as well as on the streets. It is not a function of capitalism — it is a function of sexism.

*Greer changed her ideas on rape. Cf. Germaine Greer, “Seduction Is a Four-Letter Word, ”
 
Playboy,
 
vol. 20, no. 1 (January 1973).

What Greer contributes to
Suck, and to its women readers who might look to her for cogent analysis and deep imagination, is mostly confusion. That confusion stems from an identification with men which too often blunts her perception of the real, empirical problems women face in a sexist society. That confusion manifests itself most destructively in the patently untrue notion that a woman who fucks freely is free.