Cunt (23 page)

Were the Guerrilla Girls originally a bunch of seventeen-year-old kids who bullshitted
a mission statement into being, got their act together and poetically terrorized the
art world after they finished their homework every afternoon?

Are the Guerrilla Girls really a smattering of disgruntled career gals who realized
how very, very pissed off they were that they had “sold out” instead of pursuing their
passions as artists?

Are Chelsea and Hillary Clinton Guerrilla Girls?

How weird must it be for men who work with women in New York’s finest museums and
galleries
not to know
if one of their colleagues, bosses or subordinates is one of an increasingly powerful
group of women who undermine everything they allegedly work towards together during
business hours?

It is very delicious that so much surrounding this group is a matter of conjecture.

Here’s a conservative guess: ,

The Guerrilla Girls originated as seven to twenty-eight women who decided to do something
together instead of sitting back and witnessing the horror.

Talk about an inspiration to the nation.

Here is the recipe for starting an activist group in your hometown:

1. pictures
   
2. words
   
3. a reproduction and distribution system
   
4. women friends with imagination, focus and motivation—especially ones who work at Kinko’s.
   

Put it all together.

On your marks,

get set.

Go.

Cuntlovin’ Women’s Art Movement
Item #C.W.A.M.-4: disbursement of revenue

Get CDs and books at the library when appreciating the work of men. Rent their movies.
Watch their sporting events on TV.

Buy CDs and books by women. Go to the theater to see films by women, and purchase
videos for your gorgeously expanding library. Buy tickets to our basketball games.

Disburse revenue into the women’s art world in your community and afar. Each cent
spent on work by men is money taken away from the Cuntlovin’ Women’s Art Movement.

I love money.

I love money so much I can hardly contain my passion for it.

Money rules.

Besides shelter, featuring a warm cushy bed, heat, electricity, a pot to piss in and
a floor to watch my period blood drip onto, money equals: time to work on my book,
presents for people I love, a sumptuous, satin-lined, floor-length, pink, polyester
fur coat with matching bikini, mango mochi ice cream, a telephone line and an e-mail
account, a three hour luxuriation and massage at the communal women’s baths, new books
and CDs, industrial-sized rolls of double-sided tape, sheets of stickers with my face
next to an alien’s, fancy dinner dates and that divine three tiered cocktail table
at the antique store.

Lordisa yes, money is grand.

Making,

managing and

generating

yet more money in a cuntlovin’ way that makes me smile from earlobe to earlobe is
an absolute different story.

There are two ways to make money in a capitalist, patriarchal setting:

1. Fuck other people over faster and more efficiently than they fuck you over.
   
2. Whore.
   

I’m too much of a sucker for the wrath of karma to excel at #1, so that leaves #2.
In this context, Whoring consists of selling some aspect of one’s being in order to
survive. Sometimes this is selling one’s dexterity at the espresso machine and other
times it’s selling one’s ability to seduce people into buying things they don’t want.
Sometimes we think we can escape corporate Whoredom by becoming artists or owning
our own businesses.

But no.

To make money, we gotta associate ourselves with a corporate pimp somewhere along
the food chain.

This ain’t circumventable.

Any kind of Cuntlovin’ Women’s Economic System that’s implemented in this society
will have to answer to the capitalist patriarchy because the buck stops there. It
is downright illegal to ignore the IRS. Please inform me if there’s a single behemoth
insurance company owned and operated by women, but I’m quite certain the New York
Stock Exchange floor has never been grid-locked by cuntlovin’ ladies vying to invest
in the education of our children.

So be it.

At the 1997 Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, I met a writer for a popular American
magazine. We got to talking, and duly realized that we totally disagreed on pretty
much every mien of existence. This in no way hampered our mutual fascination and respect
for one another.

I will never in my life forget her candor when she said to me (of all people) in an
unabashedly woman-centered community (of all places), “I am totally seduced by male
power.”

In context, it was one of the most brutally honest statements I’d ever heard—even
though (and indubitably because) I could not relate on any spectrum of cognizance.
She’d put great and highly intelligent thought into her choice for survival, which
involved investing all of her power and trust in the capitalist patriarchy economic
model.

Which makes perfect sense.

The proof is in the pudding.

The largest, most successful women-owned companies in the United States are cute little
unicorns that play in the rainbow compared to the village-stomping dragons like Microsoft,
GE and Disney.

I ain’t never heard tell of an internationally recognized multimedia production company,
chain of car dealerships, real estate conglomerate, advertising agency or garbage-collection
firm owned and operated solely by women. There are no states with women in all positions
of political office, from the governor on down to the postmaster in each city. If
mafias are needed to keep the economy humming along, there certainly aren’t any matrifocal
ones testifying to the truth of this.

This has been the economic reality since time out of my grammy’s mind. Past and present
cuntlovin’ businesses are inherently at odds in this reality. Subsequently, they must
fight like the devil in order to remain solvent.

Cunt would never have become a product accessible to consumers if it weren’t for the
rippling effect of one woman’s struggle and tenacious dream. One woman’s unwavering
standard to employ and serve women creates a cuntlovin’ consciousness that bolsters
every person who works for—or comes in contact with—her company. Rest assured, pretty
much any product purchased from a cuntlovin’ business benefits all women in a similar
manner.

Cuntlovin’ businesswomen are consistently on the economic defense because—at present—we
aren’t the ones who foment the rules and codes of supply and demand. Women have no
modern history of managing commerce on the civic, county, state or federal level.

I am a sharecropper on the patriarchy’s land.

I can dress this up with all the modes of independence imaginable, but if I want my
mail every day, I am at the mercy of the United States Postal Service. The electricity
for my computer is compliments of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which still
often boasts repair signs that remind me of the fact that this society is run by a
series of “Men Working.”

Furthermore, individual women are systematically shot down when we make a stand in
the name of anything that defies the white male standard of existence. To my dying
day, I’m gonna be cranky about the fact that Dr. Jocelyn Elders got canned for testing
our society’s puritanical tolerance level about sexuality.

Women who acquire the courage, will and/or money to secure positions of high-octane
power and prestige must conduct business within the same “mainstream designations”
found in the art world. Likewise, in order to become and remain a hugely successful
organization, woman-owned companies must alienate women.

Marjorie Merriweather Post, for example.

Her father, C. W. Post, of Raisin Bran fame, was right there at the crest of the breakfast
and advertising economic revolutions here in America. He insisted his only child be
involved in the intrigues of business. Marjorie was raised much differently than other
girls of her generation. She grew up with a sense of entitlement and independence,
believing her gender was certainly no hindrance in getting what she wanted. Undoubtedly,
this is more a reflection of C. W. Post’s money, whiteness and love for his only child,
than the philosophies of the women’s movement at the time. The result was, nonetheless,
a strong-willed woman who controlled a huge corporation after her father kicked. Almost
until the day she died, Ms. Post ran the family business, and she did so under the
same model as every other “successful” corporation in America. Men held positions
of power and decision. Women were secretarial mom-wife-Whore-sis sycophants.

I reckon if the breakfast-cereal industry hadn’t been revolutionized by C. W. Post
and the Kellogg brothers until, oh say 1960, and Marjorie Merriweather Post was raised
in the ’70s and took over in the ’90s, Post Cereal would’ve ran its course along pretty
much the same gender lines. There would, as a concession to existing mainstream designations,
perhaps be a smattering of men and women of color and white women secreted away in
a few executive positions.

It’s doubtful that Marjorie would have employed only women, provided child care, self-protection
courses, profit sharing, investment groups and generous retirement plans for her employees.
Neither would she have played Tori, Nina Simone, Me’Shell, Shonen Knife, Sinéad and
Yma Sumac over the factory loudspeakers to boost morale, meanwhile revolutionizing
the advertising industry’s image of women and children with her sheer buying power.

Good businesswomen just don’t take risks like that.

So let’s, shall we, define risk:

It’s a risk for women to run the show because the show was designed to be run by an
elite group of white men.

Women will never be an elite group of white men, so the show was not designed to be
run by us.

Deedle dee doo, Catch-22.

When I feel defeated or frustrated or just dang upset because there is simply no sidestepping
this shitty reality, I sometimes call my sister. She says, “Count your blessings,
ya’ lucky hooker. Don’t be bitter. Your face gets all ugly when you’re bitter.”

I represent maybe .0001 percent of cuntlovin’ ladies throughout history who have been
and continue to be bored to death with the plights of this reality.

Sometimes though, I
feel
like being bitter because I wake up in the morning and just have to face the fact
that within this economic model,
it makes perfect sense
for Kevin Costner to spend more money on a single, fully lunkheaded movie that contributes
absolutely nothing to society than the entire nation of El Salvador sees in one year.

My face gets all ugly and I call my sister and she reminds me I’m a lucky hooker when
I think about the multitudes of women who are creating desperately needed and appreciated
products that have no
physical place
within the capitalist, patriarchal economic model and—like women artists—struggle
to prove our
existence
long before advancing upon the struggle to
survive.

I work with a woman named Kathleen Gasperini who publishes
W.I.G.
(Women in General) magazine.
W.I.G.
is focused on giving women a place to write about our fabulous lives and adventures
living them, the music and sports that move us, our poetry and stories, interviews
with other women living their fabulous lives and our battles with cancer, violence,
poverty, racial and sexual hatred, drugs and/or eating disorders.

Ms. Gasperini has a difficult time finding investors because her magazine does not
reflect standard “women’s interests” found in other culturally accepted “women’s magazines.”

Here is what potential investors say to Ms. Gasperini, “There’s no section for your
magazine in the stores. It can’t be in the sports section. It’s not just about fitness
and health. Neither is it for new mothers, brides-to-be, lesbians or feminists. If
you focused more on fashion and make-up, we’d be happy to invest because then we’d
know how to market it and people would know where to find it.”

The fact that
W.I.G.
is one of a handful of like-minded, brilliant magazines—
Bitch
,
Bust
and
Hues
come readily to mind—doesn’t seem to inspire any thoughts about a market of consumers
who represent an acute demand for what these magazines supply.

Once upon a time, Kathleen Gasperini spent two months begging her printers to be patient
for the money she owed them, as a gentleman who runs a major magazine publishing company
had expressed an interest in investing in
W.I.G.
Week after week they played phone tag, Kathleen’s heart lodged in her throat.

When she finally met with him, he had the following nugget of inspiration to impart:

“You are the wrong gender for what we are focusing on at this time. The market is
going crazy for young men right now.”