First they attacked the women’s manifesto, pointing out the defects of its wishy-washy liberal reformism by comparing it with the arguments of city councils about the treatment of the blacks. By analogy with the development of Black Power as the first significant attack on the pattern of paternalistic legislation, they argued for a kind of Woman Power movement in which the first prerogative was to develop power, self-confidence and an authentic female strategy. Beverly Jones pointed out that the women students who were members of the SDS were privileged women who had not yet formed any clear idea of the disabilities which increasingly encumber women as they move on their divinely sanctioned path towards kinder and küche. She stressed the need to fight their own battles in order to find out what the problems really were, on the SDS pattern ‘Confrontation is political awareness’. Women who were successful in the male-dominated movement had become so by manipulating their special position and pandering to male values, and as such were no more entitled to speak for their sisters than black businessmen are to represent Harlem; nevertheless, even for them, as yet unmarried and relatively energetic, their dependence upon men for any ego or prestige already made their lives a travesty and a nightmare which they had not the wit or pride to reject. As a married woman she drew a horrific picture of what they ought to expect, and drew up a nine-point policy which has since become more or less basic in the young women’s liberation groups.
Women must resist pressure to enter into movement activities other than their own. There cannot be restructuring of this society until the relationships between the sexes are restructured. The inequalitarian relationships in the home are perhaps the basis of all evil. Men can commit any horror, or cowardly suffer any mutilation of their souls and retire to the home to be treated there with awe, respect, and perhaps love. Men will never face their true identity or their real problems under these circumstances, nor will we…
Since women in great measure are ruled by the fear of physical force, they must learn to protect themselves…
We must force the media to a position of realism…
Women must share their experiences with each other until they understand, identify, and explicitly state the many psychological techniques of domination in and out of the home. These should be published and distributed widely until they are common knowledge. No woman should feel befuddled and helpless in an argument with her husband…
Somebody has got to start designing communities in which women can be freed from their burdens long enough for them to experience humanity…
Women must learn their own history because they have a history to be proud of and a history which will give pride to their daughters…. Courageous women brought us out of total bondage to our present improved position. We must not forsake them but learn from them and allow them to join the cause once more. The market is ripe for feminist literature, historic and otherwise. We must provide it.
Women who have any scientific competency at all ought to begin investigating the real temperamental and cognitive differences between the sexes…
Equal pay for equal work has been a project poo-pooed by the radicals but it should not be because it is an instrument of bondage…
In what is hardly an exhaustive list I must mention abortion laws.16
It would be too easy to cavil at the ignorance of point 7 (research into sex differences has been going on for fifty years) or at point 8 for its syntactic incoherence. Point 2, learning to protect oneself, is not such a difficult matter, for weapons are easy enough to acquire and karate lessons are included in the syllabus of debutantes’ finishing schools: the difficulty is to render physical violence irrelevant, which is the only hope of any human being, but none of the feminist groups has so far emerged with a strategy. Part II of Towards a Women’s Liberation Movement was written by Judith Brown, research assistant in psychiatry at the University of Florida. She too described the position of radical middle-class women in SDS, and developed the idea of marriage being to women what integration was to the blacks, using the nigger/female analogy that has become so popular, and so misleading, in discussions of the female question. She suggested all-female communes for radical women, but did not see that an all-female commune is in no way different from the medieval convents where women who revolted against their social and biological roles could find intellectual and moral fulfilment, from which they exerted no pressure on the status quo at all. Her consideration of celibacy as a tactic made the conventual aspect of her strategy even more apparent. Lesbianism and masturbation as alternatives to integration do not weaken the force of the convent parallel significantly. The manifesto ends with an unsigned incoherent lament for the second arrest of Carol Thomas and her incarceration for a considerable period. The point is not made that she was specifically victimized as a woman, indeed the charge on which she was arrested is not named, but as a demonstration of solidarity between revolutionary women perhaps it has some value.
We have not conned ourselves into political paralysis as an excuse for inaction—we are a subjugated caste. We need to develop a female movement, most importantly, because we must fight this social order, with all of the faculties we have got, and those in full gear. And we must be liberated so that we can turn from our separate domestic desperation—our own Apocalypse of the Damned—toward an exercise of social rage against each dying of the light. We must get our stuff together, begin to dismantle this system’s deadly social and military toys, and stop the mad dogs who rule us every place we’re at.17
The female quest for self-knowledge suddenly discovered a whole new arsenal, the work of Masters and Johnson, published in 1966 with the title Human Sexual Response. The implications for female liberation were first savagely outlined by Mette Eiljerson and then read in the original Danish by a Feminist, Anne Koedt. The argument of Miss Koedt’s The Myth of Vaginal Orgasm, that orgasmic potency became through the anatomical ignorance of Freud and Reich an unattainable goal for woman and a cause of greater shame and inauthenticity in sexual behaviour, is indubitably correct, but her corollaries, that the mistake was the deliberate result of male chauvinism, that the vagina is irrelevant to female sexual pleasure, that men insist on penetration because the vagina is the pleasantest place for a penis to be (a touch of female chauvinism here!), are at best doubtful. ‘Men fear that they will become sexually expendable if the clitoral orgasm is substituted for the vaginal as the basic pleasure for women…’18
One wonders just whom Miss Koedt has gone to bed with. Most men are aware of the clitoris and are really frightened of being desired simply as a sexual object. The man who is expected to have a rigid penis at all times is not any freer than the woman whose vagina is supposed to explode with the first thrust of such a penis. Men are as brainwashed as women into supposing that their sexual organs are capable of anatomical impossibilities. Miss Koedt’s assumptions show that she has seen through her own brainwashing but not through theirs. Her last point is most peculiar.
Lesbianism—Aside from the strictly anatomical reasons why women might seek women lovers, there is a great fear on men’s part that women will seek the company of other women on a full, human basis. The establishment of clitoral orgasm as fact would threaten the heterosexual institution. The oppressor always fears the unity of the oppressed, and the escape of women from the psychological hold men now maintain. Rather than imagining a future free relationship between individuals, men tend to react with paranoid fears of revenge on the part of women (as witnessed with the V. Solanas events).19
One wonders who shot whom according to Miss Koedt’s version! In most cases male unity is preserved at the expense of outlawing any sexual contact between male members of the group. Sex is simply not a cohesive force. Homosexual groups within society as we know it are not noted for their cohesiveness or cooperation, although that is not itself a refutation of homosexuality in a different situation where guilt and dishonesty were not inescapable concomitants. The most subtle of the assumptions behind such a paper is that the status qu
o, which in this case is the vaginal sensitivity of middle-class American lovers in the 1960s, is the only possible situation: in developing her theory Anne Koedt condemns all women to that condition. Until the experiments are carried out in Tahiti and other outlandish places (if they still exist) we will not know what level of insensitivity is anatomically determined. At all events a clitoral orgasm with a full cunt is nicer than a clitoral orgasm with an empty one, as far as I can tell at least. Besides, a man is more than a dildo. Nancy Mann wrote a corrective to Miss Koedt’s article, which is now issued with it by the New England Free Press. She attempts a new explanation of female failure to achieve orgasm, mostly on the grounds that we are not doing it right, that we are not turned on to the essential nature of the experience. Her conclusion is a hopeful one of women who really don’t want to masturbate or learn tribadism.
I’m sure it’s no coincidence that so many people in this country have bad sex. It goes along with the general disregard for human pleasures in favour of the logic of making profit. Obviously people have real control over and responsibility for their actions in sex. But for women to blame it all on to men (or men to blame it all on women) is bad politics…Sex, work, love, morality, the sense of community—the things that have the greatest potential for being satisfying to us are undermined and exploited by our social organization. That’s what we’ve got to fight.
If you can’t get along with your lover you can get out of bed. But what do you do when your country’s fucking you over?20
The obvious softening of Anne Koedt’s grim satisfaction at ousting the penis does not protect Nancy Mann from the snide bitchery of female columnists; in her sneering article in New York, Julie Baumgold managed to imply that Miss Mann’s surname, as good a Jewish name as her own, was evidence of female chauvinism and penis envy.21 In fact, despite the generally derisive attitude of the press, female liberation movements have so far been very much a phenomenon of the media. The gargantuan appetite of the newspapers for novelty has led to the anomaly of women’s liberation stories appearing alongside the advertisement for emulsified fats to grease the skin, scented douches to render the vagina more agreeable, and all the rest of the marketing for and by the feminine stereotype. Female liberation movements are good for news stories because of their atmosphere of perversion, female depravity, sensation and solemn absurdity.
The summer of 1968 was not only momentous for the women’s movement because women emerged as a coherent group in the New Left but also because Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol. Suddenly SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, was big news, battling with Bobby Kennedy’s assassination for the front page. There is, apart from Miss Solanas herself, little evidence that SCUM ever functioned. She was too easily characterized as a neurotic, perverted exhibitionist, and the incident was too much a part of Warhol’s three-ring circus of exploited nuts for her message to come across unperverted. But people read her book for thrills, and got more than they bargained for. More than any of the female students she had seized upon the problem of the polarity, of the gulf which divides men and women from humanity and places them in a limbo of opposite sides. She advanced the most shocking strategy for allowing women to move back to humanity—simply, that they exterminate men. It was probably the fierce energy and lyricism of her uncompromising statement of men’s fixation on the feminine, and their desperate battle to live up to their own penile fixation, which radicalized Ti-Grace Atkinson out of NOW, and even gingered up those ladies’ slogans until they managed to purify their ranks of such brutality, and eventually gave birth to WITCH, Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. WITCH is essentially an experiment with the media. Public bra-burning, hexing the Chase Manhattan Bank, and invading the annual Bride Fair at Madison Square Garden dressed as witches and bearing broom-sticks were all bally-hoo operations, and, given the susceptibility of the commercial system to its own methods, they worked, to the point of causing the Wall Street market to drop five points, but nowadays, through fear of the Tactical Police Force and other forms of establishment reprisal, what is essentially a publicity movement has gone anonymous and underground.
After the first rush of derisive publicity women’s liberation has adopted a suspicious and uncooperative attitude to the press, a tactic which has in no way improved their public image or even protected it from figuring so large in Sunday supplements and glossy magazines. In fact, no publicity is still bad publicity, especially when women are so tied to a lifelong habit of careless reading that most of the sneering was lost on them, and where it was not its obviousness provoked a certain sympathy for the individuals who were being so grossly ill-treated by the media which were exploiting them. Women were glad to know that ‘something is happening here’, even if ‘what it is ain’t exactly clear’. Every time a statement by a woman seeking liberation, either from taxation which prevents her from practising her profession as a married woman or from sexual dominion and inauthenticity, reaches the newspapers, the response is enormous, and the controversy spreads over several issues, if we take the article by Vivian Gornick in the Village Voice as an example.22 For every woman who writes a letter to the editor there are hundreds who can’t manage it, and every time a male writes in derision and fear the point is underlined a hundredfold. It is to be hoped that more and more women decide to influence the media by writing for them, not being written about. The influence could extend to other media as well, for the enormous belly of daily television must be fed, and if feminist programmes are financed by cosmetic firms so much the better. We might as well let them pay the costs of their own grave-digging. In any case, insulting and excluding reporters is no defence against them; censorship is the weapon of oppression, not ours.
There are many other women’s liberation movements now operating in America, from the university chapters, which count twenty-five as a large turnout and remain local manifestations dealing with their own problems, to groups like the Red Stockings, formed when they were jeered by the men at the anti-inaugural demonstration in Washington, who concentrate on consciousness-raising in the Marcusian sense, to the 17 October movement of which Anne Koedt and Shulamith Firestone are members, to Cell 55, to Abby Rockefeller’s Boston-based Women’s Liberation movement, whose conference last summer was attended by five hundred women who got up at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning to watch a karate demonstration (Rockefeller and Roxanne Dunbar have green belts), to the Congress to Unite Women (which sadly only marshalled five hundred women). The movement is endlessly divided and dividing but this may be taken as a sign of life, if not power.
In England, Women’s Liberation workshops are appearing in the suburban haunts of the educated house-wife, and in the universities. There is no great coherence in their theory and no particular imagination or efficiency to be observed in their methods. The Tufnell Park Liberation workshop produced a paper called Shrew which is badly distributed. After five phone-calls to try and secure back numbers I gave up. When these worthy ladies appeared at the Miss World contest with their banners saying ‘We are not sexual objects’ (a proposition that no one seemed inclined to deny) they were horrified to find that girls from the Warwick University movement were chanting and dancing around the police. They begged them to desist because it was so unladylike and their image was already so shabby, and when the next issue of Shrew appeared it contained an official lamentation about the demeanour of these strange women, assuming in pity for their uncouthness that they were Coventry housewives with four children apiece, the very people the Women liberators were anxious to help! In fact, the Coventry chapter is one of the few which are attended by working-class women who tell the privileged girls how it is, a tendency which could well be followed by other privileged women who have not so far learned to demand anything but the vacuous notion of ‘equal opportunity’.23
Nevertheless, despite chaos and misconception, the new feminism grows apace. The new Feminist Theatre, sponsored by Red Stockings, fills the Village Gate in New York. Although few women are misled
by the red herring of learning male violence as a revolutionary tactic or practising celibacy, wives and mothers did march around the Hudson Street alimony jail with posters announcing that they didn’t want alimony. As Gloria Steinem remarked, the growth of the liberation movement has ‘happened not so much by organization as contagion’.24 The actual movement extends farther and deeper than the underground organization whose publications are disseminated by the NEFP and Agit-prop, and even wider than Mrs Friedan’s female establishment. An anti-female-liberation motion was overwhelmingly defeated by a predominantly male audience at a university debate that I spoke at lately, when a similar debate five years ago, although argued much better than this, was roundly defeated. When I addressed a very mixed and uneccentric audience at an adult education centre on Teesside the week before, soft-spoken nervous women spoke in front of their husbands about the most subversive ideas. Nurses are misbehaving, the teachers are on strike, skirts are all imaginable levels, bras are not being bought, abortions are being demanded…rebellion is gathering steam and may yet become revolution.
Revolution
Revolution
Reaction is not revolution. It is not a sign of revolution when the oppressed adopt the manners of the oppressors and practise oppression on their own behalf. Neither is it a sign of revolution when women ape men, and men women, or even when laws against homosexuality are relaxed, and the intense sexual connotation of certain kinds of clothes and behaviour are diminished. The attempt to relax the severity of the polarity in law bears no relation to the sway that male-female notions hold in the minds and hearts of real people. More women are inspired to cling to their impotent femininity because of the deep unattractiveness of Barbara Castle’s seamed face and her depressing function as chief trouble-shooter of the Wilson regime than are inspired to compete like she did for man’s distinction in a man’s world. We know that such women do not champion their own sex once they are in positions of power, that when they are employers they do not employ their own sex, even when there is no other basis for discrimination. After all they get on better with men because all their lives they have manipulated the susceptibilities, the guilts and hidden desires of men. Such women are like the white man’s black man, the professional nigger; they are the obligatory woman, the exceptional creature who is as good as a man and much more decorative. The men capitulate.
The Female Eunuch Page 33