Going Too Far (31 page)

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Authors: Robin Morgan

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Language itself is one powerful barometer of influence. More and more women use “lesbian” proudly in self-description, calling on the history of that word, dating from an age and an island where women were great artists and political figures. Why do
any
of us still use “gay” to describe ourselves at all—that trivializing, male-invented, and male-defining term? If we are serious about our politics, then we must be responsible about the ways in which we communicate them to others,
creating new language when necessary to express new concepts. But the sloppy thinking and lazy rhetoric of the straight and gay male movements pollutes our speech, and when Jill Johnston in one column claims Betty Friedan as a lesbian and then, a few months later, after Friedan's attack in the
New York Times
, calls Friedan a man—I, for one, get confused. And angry. Because the soggy sentimentality of the first statement and the rank stupidity of the second
mean nothing politically
. The point is, very regrettably, that Friedan
is
a woman. And can stand as one of many examples of the insidious and devastating effect of male
politics
.

There
is
a war going on. And people get damaged in a war, badly damaged. Our casualties are rising. To say that any woman has escaped—or can escape—damage in this day on this planet is to march, self-satisfied, under the flags of smug false consciousness. And get gunned down anyway for one's pains.

Personally, I detest “vanguarditis.” I never liked it in the Left, and I find it especially distasteful weaseling its way into the Women's Movement. I think that if anything like a “vanguard” exists at all, it continually shifts and changes from group to group within a movement, depending on the specific strategies and contradictions that arise at given times, and on which groups are best equipped and placed to meet and deal with them—when and if called for by the movement as a
whole
. The responsibility of a vanguard, by the way, is to speak from, for, and to
all
of the people who gave it birth. “Lesbian Nation” cannot be the feminist solution, much less a vanguard, when it ignores these facts. And it won't do to blame the straight women who wouldn't cooperate—after all, it is the
vanguard's
responsibility as leadership to hear messages in the silence or even hostility of
all
its people, and to reply creatively, no matter how lengthy or painful that dialogue is. A willingness to do this—and to
act
on those messages—is what
makes
the vanguard the vanguard.

I don't like more-radical-than-thou games any better than more-oppressed-than-thou games. I don't like credentials games, intimidation-between-women games, or “you are who you sleep with” games. I don't like people being judged by their class background, their sexual preference, their race, choice of religion, marital status, motherhood or rejection of it, or any other vicious standard of categorization. I hate such judgments in the male power system, and I hate them in the Women's Movement. If there must be judgments at all, let them be not on where a woman is coming
from
, but on what she is moving
toward;
let them be based on her seriousness, her level of risk, her commitment, her endurance.

And by those standards, yes, there could be a lesbian vanguard. I think it would be women like Barbara Grier and Phyllis Lyon and Del
Martin and Sten Russell, and others like them who, at the height of the fifties' McCarthyism, stood up and formed a lesbian-civil-rights movement, and whose courage and staying power are ignored by the vulgar minds of certain younger women, newly lesbian from two months or two years back, who presume to dismiss such brave women as “oldies” or “life-style straights” or, again, “hopeless monogs.”

There is a new smell of fear in the Women's Movement. It is in the air when groups calling themselves killer-dyke-separatists trash lesbian-feminists who work with that anathema, straight women—trash these lesbian-feminists as “pawns, dupes, and suckers-up to the enemy.” It is in the air when Peggy Allegro writes in
Amazon Quarterly
that “at a certain point, flags can begin to dominate people. For instance, women are oppressed by the flag of the freak feminist dyke. There are all kinds of rules, shoulds and shouldn'ts, in this community, that result because of the image's power. We must beware the tendency to merely impose a new hierarchy … a new ideal ego image to persecute people.” It is in the air when ultra-egalitarianism usurps organic collectivity, or when one woman is genuinely scared to confront another about the latter's use of “chick” to describe her lover. It was in the air when I trembled to wrench the Stones record from a phonograph at a women's dance, and when I was accused of being uptight, puritanical, draggy, and of course a hung-up man-hating “straight”
for doing that
. The words are familiar, but the voices used to be male. And the smell of fear was in my gut, writing this talk, and is in my nostrils now, risking the saying of these things, taking a crazy leap of faith that our own shared and potentially ecstatic womanhood will bind us across all criticism—and that a lot more feminists in the lesbian movement will come out of their closets today.

Because polarization does exist. Already. And when I first thought about this talk, I wanted to call for unity. But I cannot. I am struck dumb before the dead body of a broomhandle-raped and murdered woman, and anyway, my voice wouldn't dent the rape-sound of the Rolling Stones. So instead, my purpose in this talk here today is to call for further polarization, but on different grounds.

Not the Lesbian-Straight Split, nor the Lesbian-Feminist Split, but the Feminist-
versus
-Collaborator Split.

The war outside, between women and male power, is getting murderous; they are trying to kill us, literally, spiritually, infiltratively. It is time, past time, we drew new lines and knew which women were serious, which women were really committed to loving women (whether that included sexual credentials or not), and, on the other side, which women thought feminism meant pure fun, or a chance to bring back a body count to their male Trot party leaders, or those who saw the Feminist Revolution as any particular life-style, correct class line,
pacifist-change-your-head-love-daisy-chain, or easy lay. We know that the personal is political. But if the political is
solely
personal, then those of us at the barricades will be in big trouble. And if a woman isn't there when the crunch comes—and it is coming—then I for one won't give a damn whether she is at home in bed with a woman, a man, or her own wise fingers. If she's in bed at all at that moment, others of us are in our coffins. I'd appreciate the polarization now instead of then.

I am talking about the rise of attempted gynocide. I am talking about survival. As one lesbian-feminist with a knack for coining aphorisms has said, “Lesbianism is in danger of being co-opted by lesbians.” Lesbians are a minority. Women are a majority. And since it is awfully hard to be a lesbian without being a woman first, the choice seems pretty clear to me.

There are a lot of women involved in that war out there, most of them not even active in the Women's Movement yet. They include the hundreds of thousands of housewives who created and sustained the meat boycott in the most formidable show of women's strength in recent years. They are mostly heterosexuals, but there are asexual and celibate women out there, too, who are tired of being told that they are sick. Because this society has said that everybody should fuck a lot, and too many people in the Women's Movement have echoed, “Yeah, fuck with women or even with men, but for god's sake
fuck
or you're
really
perverted.” And there are also genuine functioning bisexuals out there. I'm not referring to people who have used the word as a coward's way to avoid dealing honestly with homosexuality, or to avoid commitment. We all know
that
ploy. I agree with Kate [Millett] when she says that she believes that “all people are inherently bisexual”—and I also know that to fight a system one must dare to identify with the
most
vulnerable aspect of one's oppression—and women are put in prison for being lesbian, not bisexual or heterosexual per se. So that is why I have identified myself as I have—in the
Times
in 1968 and here today, although the Man will probably want to get me for hating men before he gets me for loving women.

We have enough trouble on our hands. Isn't it way past time that we stopped
settling
for blaming each other, stopped blaming heterosexual women and middle-class women and married women and lesbian women and white women and
any
women for the structure of sexism, racism, classism, and ageism, that no woman is to blame for, because we have none of us had the power to create those structures? They are patriarchal creations, not ours. And if we are collaborating with
any
of them for
any
reason, we must begin to stop. The time is short, and the self-indulgence is getting dangerous. We must stop settling for anything less than we deserve.

All women have a right to each other as women. All women have
a right to our sense of ourselves as a People. All women have a right to live with and make love with
whom we choose when we choose
. We have a right to bear and/or raise children if we choose, and
not
to if we don't. We have a right to freedom and yes, power. Power to change our entire species into something that might for the first time approach being human. We have a right, each of us, to a Great Love.

And this is the final risk I will take here today. By the right to a great love I don't mean romanticism in the Hollywood sense, and I don't mean a cheap joke or cynical satire. I
mean a great love
—a committed, secure, nurturing, sensual, aesthetic, revolutionary, holy, ecstatic love. That need, that
right
, is at the heart of our revolution. It is in the heart of the woman stereotyped by others as being a butch bar dyke who cruises for a cute piece, however much she herself might laugh at the lesbian couple who have lived together for decades. It is in their hearts, too. It is in the heart of the woman who jet-sets from one desperate heterosexual affair to another. It is in the heart of a woman who wants to find—or stay with—a man she can love and be loved by in what she has a right to demand are nonoppressive ways. It is in the heart of every woman here today, if we dare admit it to ourselves and recognize it in each other, and in all women. It is each her right. Let no one, female or male, of whatever sexual or political choice, dare deny that, for to deny it is to
settle
. To deny it is to speak with the words of the real enemy.

If we can open ourselves
to
ourselves and each other, as women, only then can we begin to fight for and create, in fact reclaim, not “Lesbian Nation” or “Amazon Nation”—let alone some false state of equality—but a real Feminist Revolution, a proud gynocratic
world
that runs on the power of women. Not in the male sense of power, but in the sense of a power plant—producing energy. And to each, that longing for, that right to, a great love filled in reality, for all women, and children and men and animals and trees and water and all life, an exquisite diversity in unity. That world breathed and exulted on this planet some twelve thousand years ago, before the patriarchy arose to crush it.

If we risk this task then, our pride, our history, our culture, our past, our future, all vibrate before us. Let those who will dare, begin.

In the spirit of that task, I want to end this talk in a strange and new, although time-out-of-mind-ancient, manner. Earlier, I “came out” in this talk as a Witch, and I did not mean that as a solely political affiliation. I affirm the past and the present spirit of the Wicce (the Anglo-Saxon word for witch, or wise woman), affirm it not only in the smoke of our nine million martyrs, but also in the thread of
real
woman-power and
real
Goddess-worship dating back beyond Crete to the dawn of our lives. In the ruling male culture, they have degraded our ritual by beginning conferences and conventions with a black-coated male,
sometimes in full priestly drag, nasally droning his stultifying pronouncements to the assemblage. Let us reclaim our own for ourselves, then, and in that process, also extend an embrace to those lesbians who, because they go to church, are held in disrepute by counter-culture lesbians. And to those women of
whatever
sexual identification who kneel in novenas or murmur in quiet moments to, oh irony, a male god for alleviation of the agony caused by male supremacy.

The short passage I am about to read is from “The Charge of the Goddess,” still used reverently in living Wiccean Covens, usually spoken by the High Priestess at the initiation of a new member. I ask that each woman join hands with those next to her.

I ask your respect for the oldest faith known to human beings, and for the ecstatic vision of freedom that lies hidden in each of your own precious, miraculous brains.

Listen to the words of the Great Mother. She says:

“Whenever ye have need of anything, once in the month, and better it be when the moon is full, then shall ye assemble in some secret place … to these I will teach things that are yet unknown. And ye shall be free from all slavery … Keep pure your highest ideal; strive ever toward it. Let naught stop you nor turn you aside … Mine is the cup of the wine of life and the cauldron of Cerridwen … I am the Mother of all living, and my love is poured out upon the Earth … I am the beauty of the Green Earth, and the White Moon among the stars, and the Mystery of the Waters, and the desire in the heart of woman … Before my face, let thine innermost divine self be enfolded in the raptures of the Infinite … Know the Mystery, that if that which thou seekest thou findest not within thee, thou wilt never find it without thee … For behold, I have been with thee from the beginning. And I await you now.”

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