Going Too Far (21 page)

Although “Goodbye” has been anthologized repeatedly, this will be the first time it appears in print complete with my own footnotes. I have written these clarifications specifically for the article's inclusion in this book, because (O, triumph of feminism!) most of the men and male-dominated groups named in the article—all of them so “heavy” and notorious at that time—have since oozed ignominiously into oblivion. Women reading the piece for the first time in anthologies both in the United States and abroad frequently write to ask me who in hell these men
were
. It is a heartening irony that their names seem to be relevant only as historical curiosities fortunate enough to have been at one point denounced by a feminist.

So,
Rat
has been liberated, for this week, at least. Next week? If the men return to reinstate the porny photos, the sexist comic strips, the “nude-chickie” covers (along with their patronizing rhetoric about being in favor of Women's Liberation)—if this happens, our alternatives are clear.
Rat
must be taken over permanently by women—or
Rat
must be destroyed.

Why
Rat
? What not EVO
¹
or even the obvious new pornzines (Mafia-distributed alongside the human pornography of prostitution)? First, they'll get theirs—but it won't be a takeover, which is reserved for something at least
worth
taking over. Nor should they be censored. They should just be helped not to exist—by any means necessary. But
Rat
, which has always tried to be a really radical
cum
life-style paper—that's another matter. It's the liberal co-optative masks on the face of sexist hate and fear, wom by real nice guys we all know and like, right? We have met the enemy and he's our friend. And dangerous. “What the hell, let the chicks do an issue; maybe it'll satisfy 'em for a while, it's a good controversy, and it'll maybe sell papers”—runs an unoverheard conversation that I'm sure took place at some point last week.

And that's what I wanted to write about—the friends, brothers, lovers in the counterfeit male-dominated Left. The good guys who think they know what “Women's Lib,” as they so chummily call it, is all about—and who then proceed to degrade and destroy women by almost everything they say and do: The cover on the last issue of
Rat
(front
and
back). The token “pussy power” or “clit militancy” articles. The snide descriptions of women staffers on the masthead. The little jokes, the personal ads, the smile, the snarl. No more, brothers. No more
well-meaning ignorance, no more co-optation, no more assuming that this thing we're all fighting for is the same; one revolution under
man
, with liberty and justice for all. No more.

Let's run it on down. White males are most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today. Yet who is controlling the supposed revolution to change all that? White males (yes, yes, even with their pasty fingers back in black and brown pies again). It just could make one a bit uneasy. It seems obvious that a legitimate revolution must be led by,
made
by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, and white
women
—with men relating to that the best they can. A genuine Left doesn't consider anyone's suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom (and functioning as objectified prizes or “coin” as well). Goodbye to all that.

Run it all the way down.

Goodbye to the male-dominated peace movement, where sweet old Uncle Dave
²
can say with impunity to a woman on the staff of
Liberation
, “The trouble with you is you're an aggressive woman.”

Goodbye to the “straight” male-dominated Left: to PL,
³
who will allow that some workers are women, but won't see all women (say, housewives) as workers (blind as the System itself); to all the old Leftover parties who offer their “Women's Liberation caucuses” to us as if that were not a contradiction in terms; to the individual anti-leadership leaders who hand-pick certain women to be leaders and then relate only to them, either in the male Left
or
in Women's Liberation—bringing their hang-ups about power dominance and manipulation to everything they touch.

Goodbye to the Weather Vain,
⁴
with the Stanley Kowalski image and theory of free sexuality but practice of sex on demand for males. “Left Out!”—not Right On—to the Weather Sisters who (and they know better—
they know
) reject their own radical feminism for that last desperate grab at male approval that we all know so well, for claiming that the
machismo
style and the gratuitous violence is their own style by “free choice” and for believing that this is the way for a woman to make her revolution … all the while, oh my sister, not meeting my eyes because Weather
men
chose Manson
⁵
as their—and your—hero.
(Honest, at least, since Manson is only the logical extreme of the normal American male's fantasy [whether he is Dick Nixon
⁶
or Mark Rudd
⁷
]: master of a harem, women to do all the shitwork, from raising babies and cooking and hustling to killing people on order.) Goodbye to all that shit that sets women apart from women; shit that covers the face of any Weatherwoman which is the face of any Manson Slave which is the face of Sharon Tate
⁸
which is the face of Mary Jo Kopechne
⁹
which is the face of Beulah Saunders
¹⁰
which is the face of me which is the face of Pat Nixon
¹¹
which is the face of Pat Swinton.
¹²
In the dark we are all the same
—and you better believe it: we're in the dark, baby. (Remember the old joke: Know what they call a black man with a Ph.D.? A nigger. Variation: Know what they call a Weatherwoman? A heavy cunt. Know what they call a hip revolutionary woman? A groovy cunt. Know what they call a radical militant feminist? A crazy cunt. Amerika is a land of free choice—take your pick of titles.) Left Out, my sister—don't you see? Goodbye to the illusion of strength when you run hand in hand with your oppressors; goodbye to the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you anything but gonorrhea.

Goodbye to RYM II, as well, and all the other RYMs
¹³
—not that the sisters there didn't pull a cool number by seizing control, but because they let the men back in after only
a day or so
of self-criticism on male chauvinism. (And goodbye to the inaccurate blanket use of that phrase, for that matter: male chauvinism is an
attitude
—male supremacy is the
objective reality, the fact
.) Goodbye to the Conspiracy,
¹⁴
who, when lunching with fellow sexist bastards
¹⁵
Norman Mailer
¹⁶
and Terry Southern
¹⁷
in a Bunny-type club in Chicago found Judge Hoffman
¹⁸
at the neighboring table—no surprise:
in the light they are all the same
.

Goodbye to Hip Culture and the so-called Sexual Revolution, which has functioned toward women's freedom as did the Reconstruction toward former slaves—reinstituted oppression by another name.
Goodbye to the assumption that Hugh Romney
¹⁹
is safe in his “cultural revolution,” safe enough to refer to “our women, who make all our clothes” without somebody not forgiving that. Goodbye to the arrogance of power indeed that lets Czar Stan Freeman of the Electric Circus
²⁰
sleep without fear at night, or permits Tomi Ungerer
²¹
to walk unafraid in the street after executing the drawings for the Circus advertising campaign against women. Goodbye to the idea that Hugh Hefner
²²
is groovy 'cause he lets Conspirators come to parties at the Mansion—goodbye to Hefner's dream of a ripe old age. Goodbye to Tuli and the Fugs
²³
and all the boys in the front room—who always knew they hated the women they loved. Goodbye to the notion that good ol' Abbie
²⁴
is any different from any other up-and-coming movie star who ditches the first wife and kids, good enough for the old days but awkward once you're Making It. Goodbye to his hypocritical double standard that reeks through the tattered charm. Goodbye to lovely pro-Women's Liberation Paul Krassner,
²⁵
with all his astonished anger that women have lost their sense of humor “on this issue” and don't laugh any more at little funnies that degrade and hurt them; farewell to the memory of his “Instant Pussy” aerosol-can poster, to his column for
Cavalier
, to his dream of a Rape-In against legislators' wives, to his Scapegoats and Realist Nuns and cute anecdotes about the little daughter he sees as often as any proper divorced Scarsdale middle-aged (thirty-eight) father; goodbye forever to the notion that he is my brother who, like Paul, buys a prostitute for the night as a birthday gift for a male friend, or who, like Paul, reels off the names in alphabetical order of people in the Women's Movement he has fucked, reels off names in the best locker-room tradition—as proof that
he's
no sexist oppressor.

Let it all hang out. Let it seem bitchy, catty, dykey, frustrated, crazy, Solanasesque, nutty, frigid, ridiculous, bitter, embarrassing, man-hating, libelous, pure, unfair, envious, intuitive, low-down, stupid, petty, liberating.
We are the women that men have warned us about
.

And let's put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism—the lie that there can be such a thing as “men's liberation groups.” Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a “threatening” characteristic shared by the latter group—skin color or sex or age, etc. The oppressors are indeed
fucked up
by being masters (racism hurts whites, sexual stereotypes are harmful to men) but those masters are not
oppressed
. Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism or racism; the oppressed have no alternative—for they have no power—but to fight. In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men—but in the short run it's going to
cost
men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. Sexism is
not
the fault of women—kill your fathers, not your mothers.

Run it down. Goodbye to a beautiful new ecology movement that could fight to save us all if it would stop tripping off women as earth-mother types or frontier chicks, if it would
right now
cede leadership to those who have
not
polluted the planet because that action implies power and women haven't had any power in about 5,000 years, cede leadership to those whose brains are as tough and clear as any man's but whose bodies are also unavoidably aware of the locked-in relationship between humans and their biosphere—the earth, the tides, the atmosphere, the moon. Ecology is no big
shtick
if you're a woman—it's always been there.

Goodbye to the complicity inherent in the
Berkeley Tribes
men being part publishers of
Trashman
Comics; goodbye, for that matter, to the reasoning that finds whoremaster Trashman a fitting model, however comic-strip far out, for a revolutionary man—somehow related to the same Super-male reasoning that permits the first statement on Women's Liberation and male chauvinism that came out of the Black Panther Party to be made
by a man
, talkin' a whole lot 'bout how the sisters should speak up for themselves. Such ignorance and arrogance ill befits a revolutionary.

We know how racism is worked deep into the unconscious by our System—the same way sexism is, as it appears in the very name of The Young Lords.
²⁶
What are you if you're a “
macho
woman”—a female Lord? Or, god forbid, a Young Lady?
Change
it, change it to the Young Gentry if you must, or never assume that the name itself is innocent of pain, of oppression.

Theory and practice—and the light-years between them. “Do it!” says Jerry Rubin
²⁷
in
Rat's
last issue—but he doesn't or every Rat reader would have known the pictured face next to his article as well as they know his own much-photographed face: it was Nancy Kurshan, the power behind the clown.

Goodbye to the New Nation and Earth People's Park
²⁸
for that matter, conceived by men, announced by men, led by men—doomed before its birth by the rotting seeds of male supremacy which are to be transplanted in fresh soil. Was it my brother who listed human beings among the
objects
which would be easily available after the Revolution: “Free grass, free food, free women, free acid, free clothes, etc.”? Was it my brother who wrote “Fuck your women till they can't stand up” and said that groupies were liberated chicks 'cause they dug a tit-shake instead of a handshake? The epitome of female exclusionism—“men will make the Revolution—and make their chicks.” Not my brother, no. Not my revolution. Not one breath of my support for the new counterculture Christ—John Sinclair.
²⁹
Just one less to worry about for ten years. I do not choose my enemy for my brother.

Goodbye, goodbye. The hell with the simplistic notion that automatic freedom for women—or nonwhite peoples—will come about ZAP! with the advent of a socialist revolution. Bullshit. Two evils pre-date capitalism and have been clearly able to survive and post-date socialism: sexism and racism. Women were the first property when the Primary Contradiction occurred: when one-half of the human species decided to subjugate the other half, because it was “different,” alien, the Other. From there it was an easy enough step to extend the Other to someone of different skin shade, different height or weight or language—or strength to resist. Goodbye to those simple-minded optimistic dreams of socialist equality all our good socialist brothers want us to believe. How liberal a politics that is! How much further we will have to go to create those profound changes that would give birth to a genderless society.
Profound
, Sister. Beyond what is male or female. Beyond standards we all adhere to now without daring to examine them as male-created, male-dominated, male-fucked-up, and in male self-interest.
Beyond all known standards
, especially those easily articulated revolutionary ones we all rhetorically invoke. Beyond, to a species with a new name, that would not dare define itself as Man.