Woman Hating (20 page)
Franz Kafka
I presume that I am free. I act. the enforcers enforce. I discover that I am not free, then: either I lie (it is necessary to lie) or I struggle (if I do not lie, I must struggle), if I struggle, I ask, why am I not free and what can I do to become free? I wrote this book to find out why I am not free and what I can do to become free.
Though the social structure begins by framing the noblest laws and the loftiest ordinances that “the great of the earth” have devised, in the end it comes to this: breach that lofty law and they take you to a prison cell and shut your human body off from human warmth. Ultimately the law is enforced by the unfeeling guard punching his fellow man hard in the belly.
Judith Malina
without the presumption of freedom, there is no freedom. I am free, how, then, do I want to live my life, do my work, use my body? how, then, do I want to be, in all my particulars?
standard forms are imposed in dress, behavior, sexual relation, punctuation. standard forms are imposed on consciousness and behavior—on knowing and expressing—so that we will not presume freedom, so that freedom will appear —in all its particulars — impossible and unworkable, so that we will not know what telling the truth is, so that we will not feel compelled to tell it, so that we will spend our time and our holy human energy telling the necessary lies.
standard forms are sometimes called conventions, conventions are mightier than armies, police, and prisons. each citizen becomes the enforcer, the doorkeeper, an instrument of the Law, an unfeeling guard punching his fellow man hard in the belly.
I am an anarchist. I dont sue, I dont get injunctions, I advocate revolution, and when people ask me what can we do that’s practical, I say, weakly, weaken the fabric of the system wherever you can, make possible the increase of freedom, all kinds. When I write I try to extend the possibilities of expression.
... I had tried to speak to you honestly, in my own way, undisguised, trying to get rid, it’s part of my obligation to the muse, of the ancien regime of grammar.
... the revisions in typography and punctuation have taken from the voice the difference that distinguishes passion from affection and me speaking to you from me writing an essay.
Julian Beck, 1965, in a foreword to an edition of
The Brig
BELIEVE THE PUNCTUATION.
Muriel Rukeyser
there is a great deal at stake here, many writers fight this battle and most lose it. what is at stake for the writer? freedom of invention, freedom to tell the truth, in all its particulars, freedom to imagine new structures.
(the burden of proof is not on those who presume freedom, the burden of proof is on those who would in any way diminish it. )
what is at stake for the enforcers, the doorkeepers, the guardians of the Law—the publishing corporations, the book reviewers who do not like lower case letters, the librarians who will not stack books without standard punctuation (that was the reason given Muriel Rukeyser when her work was violated)—what is at stake for them? why do they continue to enforce?
while this book may meet much resistance—anger, fear, dislike—law? police? courts? —at this moment I must write: Ive attacked the fundaments of culture, thats ok. Ive attacked male dominance, thats ok. Ive attacked every heterosexual notion of relation, thats ok. Ive in effect advocated the use of drugs, thats ok. Ive in effect advocated fucking animals, thats ok. here and now, New York City, spring 1974, among a handful of people, publisher and editor included, thats ok. lower case letters are not. it does make one wonder.
so Ive wondered and this is what I think right now. there are well-developed, effective mechanisms for dealing with ideas, no matter how powerful the ideas are. very few ideas are more powerful than the mechanisms for defusing them, standard form —punctuation, typography, then on to academic organization, the rigid ritualistic formulation of ideas, etc. —is the actual distance between the individual (certainly the intellectual individual) and the ideas in a book.
standard form is the distance.
one can be excited
about
ideas without changing at all. one can think
about
ideas, talk
about
ideas, without changing at all. people are willing to think about many things, what people refuse to do, or are not permitted to do, or resist doing, is to change the way they think.
reading a text which violates standard form forces one to change mental sets in order to read. there is no distance. the new form, which is in some ways unfamiliar, forces one to read differently—not to read
about
different things, but to read in different ways.
to permit writers to use forms which violate convention just might permit writers to develop forms which would teach people to think differently: not to think about different things, but to think in different ways. that work is not permitted.
If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.
Franz Kafka
The Immovable Structure is the villain. Whether that structure calls itself a prison or a school or a factory or a family or a government or The World As It Is. That structure asks each man what he can do for it, not what it can do for him, and for those who do not do for it, there is the pain of death or imprisonment, or social degradation, or the loss of animal rights.
Judith Malina
this book is about the Immovable Sexual Structure, in the process of having it published, Ive encountered the Immovable Punctuation Typography Structure, and I now testify, as so many have before me, that the Immovable Structure aborts freedom, prohibits invention, and does us verifiable harm: it uses our holy human energy to sustain itself; it turns us into enforcers, or outlaws; to survive, we must learn to lie.
The Revolution, as we live it and as we imagine it, means destroying the Immovable Structure to create a world in which we can use our holy human energy to sustain our holy human lives;
to create a world without enforcers, doorkeepers, guards, and arbitrary Law;
to create a world —a community on this planet— where instead of lying to survive, we can tell the truth and flourish.
NOTES
Chapter 1. Onceuponatime: The Roles
1
The Brothers
Grimm,
Household Stories
(New York: Dover Publications, 1963), p. 213.
2
Ibid.,
p. 213.
3
Ibid.,
p. 214.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.,
p. 216.
8
Ibid.,
p. 221
.
15
Ibid.,
p. 74.
16
Ibid.,
p. 85
17
Ibid.,
p. 220.
18
Ibid.,
p. 85.
19
Ibid.,
p. 92.
Chapter 3. Woman as Victim: Story of O
1
Newsweek, March 21, 1966, p. 108, unsigned.
2
Pauline Reage,
Story of O
(New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. xxi.
3
Ibid.,
p. 80.
4
Ibid.,
p. 93.
5
Ibid.,
p. 187.
6
Ibid.,
p. 32.
7
Ibid.,
p. 106.
8
Robert S. de Ropp,
Sex Energy: The Sexual Force in Man and Animals
(New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1969), p. 134.
Chapter 4. Woman as Victim: The Image
1
‘Jean de Berg,
The Image
(New York: Grove Press, 1966), p.
137-
2
Ibid.,
p. 19.
3
Ibid.,
p. 47.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.,
p. 10.
6
Ibid.,
p. 11.
7
Ibid.,
p. 9.
8
Ibid.,
p. 42.
9
Eliphas Levi,
The History of Magic
(London: Rider and Company, 1969), p. 263.
10
Ibid.,
p. 265.
11
"Jean de Berg,
op. cit.,
p. 11.
12
Ibid.,
p. 135.
13
The Essential Lenny Bruce,
ed. John Cohen (New York: Ballan-tine Books, 1967), pp. 296-97.
Chapter 5. Woman as Victim: Suck
1
The Essential Lenny Bruce,
ed. John Cohen (New York: Ballan-tine Books, 1967), p. 245.
2
Anne Severson and Shelby Kennedy,
I Change I Am the Same
(n. d. ).
3
Suck 6.
4
Ibid.
5
Suck 4.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
Suck 2.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
Suck
3.
Chapter 6. Gynoclde: Chinese Footbinding
1
Howard S. Levy,
Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom
(New York: W. Rawls, 1966), p. 39. Mr. Levy’s book is the primary source for all the factual, historical information in this chapter.
2
Ibid.,
p. 112.
3
Ibid.,
pp. 25-26.
4
Ibid.,
p. 26.
5
Ibid.,
pp. 26-28.
6
Ibid.,
p. 141.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.,
p. 182.
9
Ibid.,
p. 89.
10
Ibid.,
p. 144.
11
Ibid.,
pp.
144-45-
Chapter 7. Gynoclde: The Witches
1
Jules Michelet,
Satanism and Witchcraft
(London: Tandem, 1969). P- 66.
2
H. R. Hays,
The Dangerous Sex: The Myth of Feminine Evil
(London: Methuen and Co., 1966), p. 111.
3
Pennethorne Hughes,
Witchcraft
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 63.
4
Ibid.,
p. 65.
5
Ibid.,
pp. 66-67.
6
Hays,
op. cit.,
p. 147.
7
Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger,
Malleus Maleficarum,
trans. by M. Summers (London: Arrow Books, 1971), pp. 29-30.
8
Ibid.,
Table of Contents.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.,
Preface.
11
Hughes,
op. cit.,
pp. 183-84.
12
Kramer and Sprenger,
op. cit.,
p. 123.
13
Ibid.,
pp. 114-15.
14
Ibid.,
pp. 115-16.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.,
p. 117.
17
Ibid.,
p. 118.
18
Ibid.,
pp. 119-21.
19
Ibid.,
p. 112.
20
Ibid.,
pp. 122-23.
21
Hays,
op. cit.,
p. 151.
22
Ibid.,
p. 153.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.,
p. 89.
25
The Holy Bible (Philadelphia: National Bible Press, 1954), p. 8.
26
Michelet,
op. cit.,
p. 68.
27
Kramer and Sprenger,
op. cit.,
p. 161.
