Roseannearchy

by Roseanne Barr

  Another thing was that we were all “self-identified.” That term became the IN term, the buzzword, and everyone said it as a prefix. I actually said, “I am a self-identified straight woman” as kind of a joke, but no one got it at all. Soon enough, a few staunch ladyfellers came in and called themselves self-identified lesbian sadomasochists. We thought it was weird that a white woman came in to plead the S-M case for inclusion in our multicultural center with her “slave,” who was a black woman. I thought that white woman would not get out of that meeting alive. White women think they can say anything at all to black people. It is astounding!

  There was a lot of discussion and fighting over whether lesbians who like other lesbians to slap them around was politically correct, until the black woman told the collective’s black women that she was getting all the sexual servicing she really craved, and was, in fact, the one in control of the relationship, as the bottoms always are. She explained how it should actually be called “Masosadism.” Well, I never!

  I had the last word, which kept them out: “You can’t whip a black woman, even if she says she wants you to, ‘cause it just ain’t right.” Some black woman S and M-er out there right now might be thinking of taking off my head for saying that, weird as those S and M-ers are. She might think what I just wrote was akin to slinging the N-word around. That black lady masochist would probably vote for Sarah Palin, too, were she a black lady masochist Evangelical. Everyone lost their damn minds when Reagan became president.

  Separate from the slapping lesbians, a battle began to rage between the lesbians who were pagans versus the lesbians who were Christians, and then the lesbians who wanted to have “baster babies” factioned off, too. That was a huge impasse, I remember, that ended with two women crying and screaming, “We are women, too, and we want babies, too!” and other women crying and screaming back at them, “They want us all to be brood sows—come on, wake up! Don’t go all breeder! The continual celebration of spitting out more children has been forced on women in the glorified ‘pedophilia-without-sex’ cult called Motherhood!” Thirty years later, the “gaybies” (what the good-humored offspring of baster-wielding lesbians and gays call themselves) are all grown up, and are as huge a pain in the ass as the young adult offspring the rest of us had naturally.

  Then, always bubbling under the surface, the Jews’ infighting began to go public, as Zionists and Jewish Socialists destroyed each other and the Jewish presence at Woman to Woman itself—except for me and Sis. Then the Transgendered versus the Butch Dyke wars started—to see two of those folks fighting about being female was quite an eye-opener for me. You haven’t lived until you have seen a huge guy with boobs talking about female hormones and deciding to keep his penis, and how that was a feminist issue.

  Back in the mid-’70s in Denver, Jewish and black and Latino and Native American and white women used to sit around and hash out what to call themselves and then what to call one another, as they attempted to envision a more just world. Shortly after that, of course, they started fighting about whose group was the most racist and whose group suffered the most. We threw all the old racial charges back and forth, and it involved some pain and some blood, too.

  I remember big, dark women crying and screaming at me about Jews involved in the slave trade and pulling books off shelves everywhere to prove it, as they attacked me for not questioning my white-skin privileges. I would not back down, though, and I let them have it. I initially thought the Jews had it the worst for sure, because of the whole gas chamber thing, but the black women ultimately aced me when they reminded me that slavery had lasted four hundred years. Nobody can really argue with the four hundred years point; at least I don’t think so. By the time we found agreement, every white, lesbian, and middle-class woman had left the collective and come together to build a gay and lesbian community center down the street instead.

  They were more comfortable joining ranks with white gay men than with black women and Jewish women, who were obsessed with leveling charges of racism and anti-Semitism. The Latina women got sick of hearing about how Catholicism was a Jew- hating religion and started their own group, La Raza Unida.

  My sister and I stayed and were two of the four white women who chose “international feminism” over class, race, and religion. Many of the books in our library said this same thing had happened before, back when feminists and abolitionists were trying to force woman suffrage and put an end to slavery. Some of the white women thought some of the more radical black women were off-putting to the mainstream racists and excluded them, thereby greatly weakening their own movement. For her troubles (exiling Ida B. Wells), Miss Susan B. Anthony’s image was put on silver dollars.

  Sis and I flung back our charges of anti-Semitism, yelled about Zionism, cried and argued, admitted our racism, let go of it, and cried and argued some more about heterosexism and oppressive political correctness. I kept saying that we were going to lose the women in the middle, the housewives of America, with all of this extremism. I was, of course, right about all of it.

  Then the worst happened: The Jewish women left to join either Zionist groups or anti-Zionist groups of their own, and then the sad day came when the black women with white women lovers left us, too. Now it was just me and Sis and Chi, Heloise, Patti, and Dree, who had been adopted as a baby by black parents who told her that her real mother was a Jew and that was why she had big boobs and a big nose.

  Dree couldn’t decide which side to take sometimes, and she would just sit and cry till we all shut up and went to the IHOP next door to drown our sorrows in pancakes. (I heartily recommend eating pancakes for peace—it always works!) Dree and pancakes at IHOP were the twin pillars that bridged the gap among us.

  Black, biracial, or white/Jewish, we all agreed that feminism, “Womanism,” was the thing that mattered most, after years of inner and outer struggle. Now that we had all of that straight, finally, the six of us could begin to build an international movement. It was to be based on diversity.

  I said, “Let’s go check out that women’s group by the Terminal Annex and see if they want to join up with us.” Chi and I went into their bookstore, which was all about candle spells and witchcraft.

  Chi said, “Yeah, maybe this women’s movement could use some goddess energy.”

  Before, we had always argued to keep Wiccans out, mostly because we felt that they were counterrevolutionary, in that they settled for personal politics and sexual power games over radical feminist analysis of socialism. Also, the Wiccans were still largely heterosexual and were fighting with their own lesbian faction over the issue of males leading their worship circles; the straight women preferred their husbands to lesbian Priestesses, whom they said were “too male.” Chi and Dree used to make fun of the Wiccans by prancing in circles, waving old scarves around, and singing in falsetto voices about how they were magic wood nymphs who were trying to teach “Negroes” how to worship a white female as God.

  We were desperate for more members in our collective, though. And even though we snickered behind their magical backs, we admired the Wiccans somewhat for at least being out of the cultural box enough to recognize female divinity. It was all fun and games until someone got hurt, and someone did. The Wiccans opened their faux castle doors one day to find it smeared in chicken blood. They called it “being blooded” and immediately closed down their witchy storefront and disappeared. We heard that some Latina lesbian Wiccans “blooded” them in reaction to their having a white male transsexual leading their woodsy ceremonies. See what I mean about factioning?

  About this time, Sis came up with the idea of “reaching out” to the women at the university in Boulder, Colorado. The women’s studies group there was busy trying to prevent the black history curriculum from being dismantled. There was no groundswell to protest that development, due to the fact that white students were starting to claim that black students were getting preferential treatment on campus. The rich were victims now, and as a result of that conservative “grassro
ots” movement on campuses, groups that had anything to do with racial or gender parity were becoming obsolete and disappearing—all within a year or so of the triumphant Reagan Revolution.

  By 1983, everything that took root in the ‘60s was dead. That year, our shaggy collective was approached by a woman named Cynthia Raging Thunder. She said she was going to be arrested soon for smuggling guns from Central America through Mexico to go to the Indian encampment at Wounded Knee. She came to us to ask if we could help her pay for attorney fees and help her fight the charges.

  I asked her where she got the weapons to sell, and she said she had been a member of the armed services when she smuggled those weapons. “Why are you trying to overthrow the country that you are serving in the army to protect?” was what I asked her. She said she knew many other soldiers who were becoming rogue arms dealers, too. I remember thinking, I wonder if that Ronald Reagan knows that when you make everything for sale, someday it will get sold out from under you.

  That meeting with Cynthia Raging Thunder might have been a setup, some said, but it proved to be one of the final nails in the coffin of Denver’s feminism. That nail followed a spike through the heart, when our sister collective, which published Big Mama Rag, lost its tax-exempt status because the IRS deemed it an advocacy group and not an “educational institution.” Although Big Mama Rag challenged the decision, it took appeals all the way to the D.C. Federal Court of Appeals before the IRS decision was struck down. The ordeal was a blow to our cause. We started closing down the bookstore, donating and shipping the books to other women’s nonprofit bookstores in other countries, as the American ones were all closing down. We sent books out of America to international women’s parity groups in the hopes that our multicultural authors would be read and studied everywhere, but mostly in the places they actually lived (which is almost never the case with most women’s political writing) now that no multicultural feminist groups existed in Denver anymore.

  The books at the new gay and lesbian center were all about sex and “gayety.” There was no politics, no socialism, no feminist analysis. Those books had been removed, and the switch to Log Cabin Republican money worship was encouraged among the business-friendly white gays and lesbians there. In California, some twenty-five years after this, the same business-friendly GLBT organizations felt betrayed by black, working-class Christians in Oakland, whose vote against marriage equality passed Prop 8. I thought, This is like Denver factioning all over again! If official gay and lesbian organizations had not stopped supporting class struggles, Prop 8 would have easily been defeated. The divide-and- conquer tactic always works, and always cuts both ways, too. I am happy to see lots of GLBT centers now supporting single-payer and pro-labor issues. I always say, the minute that everyone who isn’t right wing teams up, everything will change.

  We all complained to the gay bookstores that there were no more lesbian feminist books in their stores, and then more and more Wiccan books started showing up where feminist intellectual books had been, as well as more and more books on exercising and dressing for success. The new gay bookstore had a lesbian shelf in the back that was marked feminism, but had no books at all about feminism or working women, just several copies of Our Bodies Ourselves and lesbian erotica, which I admit I read. By the time they get to the licking, it’s page 190, and the preceding pages are all about how to enact a rape fantasy while still “feeling safe.”

  Christ, same old shit for us gals.

  The Reagan Revolution (same shit, different century) worked perfectly for the minority it was created to serve: the Palins who go around encouraging the chickens to vote for Colonel Sanders. The thing that is so intriguing to me still is that the whole heap of shit is strung together with only words; and I keep plugging away at writing the right ones that, hopefully, honestly define the crazy times in which we live.

  Whenever I hear of some women’s group rising up in some repressive country, I think perhaps that the voices in those books are still blowing minds, like they blew mine. When I guest-edited the women’s edition of The New Yorker, I insisted that Professor Mary Daly, my favorite author and expert on Latin and theology, be included. Tina Brown did in fact keep her promise to me and made that happen despite the hit she took for inviting me to guest-edit the first and only women’s edition. The fact that Mary’s words made it into the intellectual mainstream meant more to me than any award or accolade I have ever been given, including the Peabody and the Eleanor Roosevelt Freedom of Speech awards.

  Feminist intellectualism has largely been erased since the Reagan Revolution, as seems to happen in every revolution. Still, after only a few decades, the same old voices return in new ways. Every so often, one of those voices employs the right words that tell the actual truth and not the “derivative” truth funneled through nature-hating religions or female-hating philosophies.

  That voice is coming; it’s bubbling up now.

  It gives me pleasure to know that we hippies and lefties were right about everything, and when I am in Hawaii, I find that there are many, many men’s groups that now talk about their “inner female” and getting in touch with it. I love men who know that embracing the female is the way for them to become real men! Any man who has a brain in his head has already figured out that he will attract a higher vibration of female devotion on this earth by doing that! Unfortunately, a lot of men are homogodly, and are only able to love the male energy of God, which is, ironically, the one that women need to stop prostrating themselves before if they want to implement solutions for this world!

  I also love that the pendulum is swinging back to self- sufficiency and perma-culture. It’s good that we are coming back down to earth; things are getting way real again. We simply have no other choice now. So, in a weird way, I say, viva the Reagan Revolution; it’s what brought us here, now, to 2011. For the first time in history, America’s workforce is 53 percent female. The future is indeed female! Without our influence, there will never be solutions or peace, which we must have to survive what is coming.

  We must see clearly what lies before us this time. Reduced to our most basic needs, we will be forced to figure out how we are going to get food to the hungry with the least amount of waste. That is true feminist spirituality, I think, after all these years.

  Cold hard reality will be good for us, after we all start to understand the debt we got tricked into, as the schools, hospitals, and police protection we used to get for our taxes disappear everywhere around us. Soon, the words community and communal, and even the word socialist, will not be able to be demonized by fat cats anymore. More and more people will change their obsolete definitions and create new systems that work for most people, not the fewest people anymore. It’s evolution in the making, I think, as fundamentalist religious opposition to equality and justice will go the way of other dinosaurs.

  I did my part—and continue doing my part—by voicing these truths at top volume. In fact, the words I said in 1986 on The Tonight Show got a powerful woman in television, Marcy Carsey, interested in selling a show for me. I made my debut into impolite society on a television comedy that told the story I wanted to tell, about a woman who lost her union job at a plastics factory, took a series of minimum-wage jobs, opened and lost two businesses, and her husband. At her lowest point, she begins to write about a woman who wins the lottery and buys the town’s plastics factory and gives it to the townspeople.

  Does life imitate art? I sure hope so!

  Chapter 11

  Rants for a New Century

  Now that the big SIX-O isn’t too far off, I still can’t hardly believe it, as we say in Utah. At fifty, I got really depressed, but then, one day, after staying inside and drinking alone for three months, I realized, Hey! I’ve survived fifty years of shit, and that’s half a century that I don’t have to do again. I’m kinda baaadd!

  Then I started getting defensive (my greatest talent in the world), and I thought, Hey, I’m fifty, and fifty means: Fuck it! Fuck it all! Fuck everybody and fu
ck everything they think I should do, think, or say! It’s time to tell everybody what I think, and then tell them to kiss my fat ass! ‘Cause I’m fifty, and that’s what fifty earns you the right to do!

  Here’s some of what I want to say: Forget dieting. It’s a useless waste of time perpetrated by woman-hating, heroin-addicted clothing designers and pill-pushing doctors and greedy little shits. The world is blowing up, okay? We must stop dieting, and we must stop paying attention to dieting experts, who run a bazillion-dollar-a-year industry and have no idea what they are talking about, telling us things are safe and then two years later confessing that they aren’t.

  I am the diet expert. After all, in my life I’ve lost a thousand pounds, and gained back twelve hundred. Diets are a temporary solution to a permanent problem. They only put you in that loop of obsessive-compulsive disorders: Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no—starving, hoarding, binging, purging. They just don’t work.

  The reason people are fat is because it’s genetic. If you are a great big old pie wagon, you probably come from a long, long line of great big pie wagons. You are going to have to move around if you are going to eat, and that is all there is to it! I’m tired of the abuse I have had to suffer my whole entire life for being a fat person. I’m tired of all the discrimination toward fat people—and all those barnyard names, like pig, hog, heifer, cow, making us go to fat farms to lose weight. Equating people with animals is degrading—to animals, I mean.

  People are afraid of fat people. They think we are going to eat them. They also think it’s contagious. I can’t really blame them, though, since I have a fierce eating disorder that has survived even bariatric surgery. I got even fatter after that! Hey, maybe fat people are just trying to get closer to others, did anybody ever think of that?!