Going Too Far (22 page)

I once said, “I'm a revolutionary, not just a woman,” and knew my own lie even as I said the words. The pity of that statement's eagerness
to be acceptable to those whose revolutionary zeal no one would question, i.e., any male supremacist in the counterleft. But to become a true revoluntionary one must first become one of the oppressed (not organize or educate or manipulate them, but become one of them)—or realize that you
are
one already. No woman wants that. Because that realization is humiliating, it hurts. It hurts to understand that at Woodstock
³⁰
or Altamont
³¹
a woman could be declared uptight or a poor sport if she didn't want to be raped. It hurts to learn that the sisters still in male-Left captivity are putting down the crazy feminists to make themselves look okay and unthreatening to our mutual oppressors. It hurts to be pawns in those games. It hurts to try and change
each day of your life right now
—not in talk, not “in your head,” and not only conveniently “out there” in the Third World (half of which is women) or the black and brown communities (half of which are women) but in your own home, kitchen, bed. No getting away, no matter how else you are oppressed, from the primary oppression of being female in a patriarchal world. It hurts to hear that the sisters in the Gay Liberation Front, too, have to struggle continually against the male chauvinism of their gay brothers.
³²
It hurts that Jane Alpert
³³
was cheered when rapping about imperialism, racism, the Third World, and All Those Safe Topics but hissed and booed by a Movement crowd of men who wanted none of it when she began to talk about Women's Liberation. The backlash is upon us.

They tell us the alternative is to hang in there and “struggle,” to confront male domination in the counterleft, to fight beside or behind or beneath our brothers—to show 'em we're just as tough, just as revolushunerry, just as whatever-image-they-now-want-of-us-as-once-they-wanted-us-to-be-feminine-and-keep-the-home-fire-burning. They will bestow titular leadership on our grateful shoulders, whether it's being a token woman on the Movement Speakers Bureau Advisory Board, or being a Conspiracy groupie or one of the “respectable” chain-swinging Motor City Nine.
³⁴
Sisters all, with only one real alternative: to seize our own power into our own hands, all women, separate and together, and make the Revolution the way it must be made—no priorities this time, no suffering group told to wait until after.

It is the job of revolutionary feminists to build an ever stronger independent Women's Liberation Movement, so that the sisters in counterleft captivity will have somewhere to turn, to use their power and rage and beauty and coolness in their own behalf for once, on their own terms, on their own issues, in their own style—whatever that may be. Not for us in Women's Liberation to hassle them and confront them the way their men do, nor to blame them—or ourselves—for what any of us are: an oppressed people, but a people raising our consciousness toward something that is the other side of anger, something bright and smooth and cool, like action unlike anything yet contemplated or carried out. It is for us to survive (something the white male radical has the luxury of never really worrying about, what with all his options), to talk, to plan, to be patient, to welcome new fugitives from the counterfeit Left with no arrogance but only humility and delight, to push—to strike.

There is something every woman wears around her neck on a thin chain of fear—an amulet of madness. For each of us, there exists somewhere a moment of insult so intense that she will reach up and rip the amulet off, even if the chain tears at the flesh of her neck. And the last protection from seeing the truth will be gone. Do you think, tugging furtively every day at the chain and going nicely insane as I am, that I can be concerned with the puerile squabbles of a counterfeit Left that laughs at my pain? Do you think such a concern is noticeable when set alongside the suffering of more than half the human species for the past 5,000 years
³⁵
—due to a whim of the other half? No, no, no, goodbye to all that.

Women are Something Else. This time, we're going to kick out all the jams, and the boys will just have to hustle to keep up, or else drop out and openly join the power structure of which they are already the illegitimate sons. Any man who claims he is serious about wanting to divest himself of cock privilege should trip on this: all male leadership out of the Left is the only way; and it's going to happen, whether through men stepping down or through women seizing the helm. It's up to the “brothers”—after all, sexism is their concern, not ours; we're too busy getting ourselves together to have to deal with their bigotry. So they'll have to make up their own minds as to whether they will be divested of just cock privilege or—what the hell, why not say it,
say
it!—divested of cocks. How deep the fear of that loss must be, that it can be suppressed only by the building of empires and the waging of genocidal wars!

Goodbye, goodbye forever, counterfeit Left, counterleft,
male-dominated cracked-glass-mirror reflection of the Amerikan Nightmare. Women are the real Left. We are rising, powerful in our unclean bodies; bright glowing mad in our inferior brains; wild hair flying, wild eyes staring, wild voices keening; undaunted by blood we who hemorrhage every twenty-eight days; laughing at our own beauty we who have lost our sense of humor; mourning for all each precious one of us might have been in this one living time-place had she not been born a woman; stuffing fingers into our mouths to stop the screams of fear and hate and pity for men we have loved and love still; tears in our eyes and bitterness in our mouths for children we couldn't have, or couldn't
not
have, or didn't want, or didn't want
yet
, or wanted and had in this place and this time of horror. We are rising with a fury older and potentially greater than any force in history, and this time we will be free or no one will survive.
Power to all the people or to none
. All the way down, this time.

January
1970

¹
East Village Other
, an “underground” newspaper celebrating the so-called hip culture—at the expense of women; no longer being published.

²
David Dellinger, a leader in the male-run peace movement, subsequently divorced by Betty Peterson, his wife of many years.

³
Progressive Labor (Party).

⁴
Weathermen, or the Weather Bureau. A reference to their pre-fugitive attitudes, as sexist as their later ones.

⁵
Convicted mass murderer and self-styled harem-keeper of “slaves.”

⁶
Alleged used-car salesman.

⁷
Used-revolution salesman.

⁸
Victim (murdered) of Manson “Family.”

⁹
Victim (?) of Senator Edward Kennedy.

¹⁰
Victim of the welfare system; organizer in welfare rights.

¹¹
Victim of alleged used-car salesman.

¹²
Victim of Leftist loyalties which led to her indictment in a bombing conspiracy, but saved from Rightist patriarchs by the sacrifice and support of feminists.

¹³
Revolutionary Youth Movements (I, II, and III), spin-off groups from SDS (Students for Democratic Society).

¹⁴
The Conspiracy Seven or the Chicago Seven. Male activists who were on trial for conspiracy in organizing demonstrations against the previous Democratic Convention.

¹⁵
An example (along with the phrase “son-of-a-bitch”) of male-supremacist linguistics which can transform a word into a pejorative term in order to place the blame for sins of the son upon—who else—his mother. This had not been borne in upon me yet, in 1970.

¹⁶
and
¹⁷
Two hack writers.

¹⁸
The extremely conservative judge who presided over the trial of the Conspiracy Seven. Supposedly their adversary.

¹⁹
A counter-culture “leader,” dictator of the traveling commune so delicately named The Hog Farm.

²⁰
A New York discotheque of the period, capitalizing on sexism.

²¹
A misogynistic cartoonist.

²²
Founder and owner of
Playboy
magazine. Enough said.

²³
A vulgar rock band of the period; specializing in sexist lyrics.

²⁴
Abbie Hoffman, a minor “nonleader” leader of hip culture at that time. Currently a fugitive from the FBI (after having been charged with selling hard drugs), and a self-proclaimed bigamist of wives #2 and #3.

²⁵
Editor of
The Realist
(a sexist paper of satire), and a used-humor sales man. Also the former son-in-law of Norman Mailer, cited earlier.

²⁶
Puerto Rican radical group of the period.

²⁷
Still another “nonleader” leader of the hip Left. Currently into “bio-karma.”

²⁸
New Nation and Earth People's Park: both of them so-called radical organizing projects which dissolved.

²⁹
Then leader of the “White Panther Party,” jailed for ten years on a drug charge—but soon after, of course, released.

³⁰
and
³¹
Rock festivals attended by masses of people, where women and blacks were vulnerable to rape and murder.

³²
This, of course, was before most lesbian activists deserted the “Gay Movement” for the Women's Movement.

³³
A leading Leftist revolutionary woman, later a fugitive who, in an open letter from the underground (“Mother-Right—A New Feminist Theory,”
Ms
., August 1973), denounced male-style politics and embraced radical feminism.

³⁴
A male-approved “toughie” group of Leftist women who had contempt for feminist issues.

³⁵
I have learned since that it has actually been ten to twelve thousand years since the rise of patriarchy.

³⁶
All of the women on this list were at that time captives of a male-supremacist Leftist man and/or of patriarchal Leftist political beliefs—with two exceptions: Kim Agnew, the publicly rebellious daughter of Spiro Agnew (used-cash salesman), and Valerie Solanas, then serving time on a conviction of having shot Andy Warhol (used-decadence salesman).

ON VIOLENCE AND FEMINIST BASIC TRAINING

I am including the following article in this section of
Going Too Far
because it was originally drafted for the Women's Rat, although it never appeared there, due to our plague of priorities. It went through several reconceptions and revisions and over a year later, in the spring of 1971, I finally presented it as a paper at the Radical Feminist Conference in Detroit. Yet the piece still bears the unmistakable influence of that year at the newspaper: the tone of
Rat
is present—Leftist style mixed uneasily with Feminist content, the whole thing whipped to a froth of urgency to avoid curdling at the boil. There is an aura of Playing War in this article, which at the time did seem preferable to Playing House, but which now strikes me as equally infantile and even more unsatisfying.

Still, we were not playing games. Agnew was calling for “preventive detention” camps; friends were going underground or being sent to prison for twenty-year terms in punishment for political actions. People one had known and worked with and demonstrated with were suddenly dead of gunshot wounds in the middle of their college quads or on the city sidewalk two blocks away. To dare focus energy on women's needs per se seemed at times to constitute a betrayal of humanity. Fortunately, such “betrayal” continues today, in 1977, where the magnificent women forging a peace movement in Northern Ireland are termed “traitors” by both Protestants and Catholics—for demanding an end to the massacre of their children.

Betrayal or no, I was unable to escape my own feminism; unable to deny that another woman could better teach me how to handle a rifle in one afternoon than all my patronizing Leftist brothers could in months. (Why? something in her manner? I couldn't understand; sympathy? patience? humor?
why?
) I was unable to overlook child-care demands as “bourgeois” now that I was a mother (even though I still treated
the issue of child care peremptorily and guiltily, as I do in this paper).

No, we weren't playing games. The
Rat
year was the same one in which both Kenneth and I were fired from our jobs in publishing—he for refusing to remove a poster denouncing the My Lai atrocities from his office wall, and I for union organizing on the job. It was the year, too, that I first went to jail. “Bring the war home!” was one chant I remember, and it seemed that the war certainly came home to us in 1970.