Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  But women seem to be moving on the issue with a different strategy, one that circumvents censorship and instead is aimed at hurting the purveyors themselves, at making the business less lucrative by making the clients less comfortable. In one Southern town, women planned their action with considerable wit; they took up positions on their local porn strip and politely photographed each man as he entered or left the bookstores and movie houses. They used a very obvious camera—the large, newspaper-photographer type—sometimes chasing the man for a block as he fled in chagrin. One group of women who used this tactic deliberately worked with cameras that had no film—scaring and embarrassing the men was their aim. Another group, however, did use film, and developed the shots. They then made up Wanted Posters of the men which they plastered all over town—to the acute humiliation of the porn-purchasers, some of whom turned out to be influential and upstanding citizens of the community. In Seattle, women’s anti-pornography squads have stink-bombed smut bookstores—and the local papers were filled with approving letters to the editors. In New York, three porn movie houses have been fire-bombed.

  The massive porn industry grinds on, of course. In a replay of the liberated-woman shill, we are now being sold so-called female-oriented pornography, as if our sexuality were as imitative of patriarchal man’s as Playgirl is of Playboy. It must be frustrating to the pushers of such tacky trash to realize that for most women Wuthering Heights is still a real turn-on, or that there are quite a few of us who remained loyal to Ashley Wilkes (especially as portrayed by Leslie Howard) and never were fooled by that gross Rhett Butler. Yet pornography today is becoming chic—serious movie houses which usually run art films are now cashing in on so-called art-porn. The Mick Jagger/sadism fad, the popularity of transvestite entertainers, and the resurgence of “Camp” all seem to me part of an unmistakable backlash against what feminists have been demanding. It is no coincidence that FBI statistics indicate the incidence of rape increased 93 percent in the 1960’s. When people refuse to stay in their place, the message must be repeated in a louder tone.3

  And what is this doing to us? We are somewhat educated now as to the effects of rape on women, but we know much less about the effects of pornography. Some obvious trends can be noted: the market for go-go girls, nude models, and pornofilm “actresses,” which in turn affects women’s employment (why be a secretary when you can make more money taking off your clothes?); the overlapping boundaries of the porn and prostitution industries; the erosion of the virgin/whore stereotypes to a new “all women are really whores” attitude, thus erasing the last vestige of (even corrupted) respect for women; the promotion of infidelity and betrayal as a swinging alternative to committed relationships. But how to chart the pressure sensed by women from their boyfriends or husbands to perform sexually in ever more objectified and objectifying fashion as urged by porn movies and magazines? How to connect the rise of articles in journals aimed at educated, liberal audiences—articles extolling the virtues of anal intercourse, “fist-fucking,” and other “kinky freedoms”?4

  But how far-reaching is the effect, how individual, how universal? Individual in terms of the specific humiliation felt by the woman whose husband hides Penthouse or some harder-core version of it in the bathroom and then forces himself on her at night—or on other women when she fends him off—and then blames her for her frigidity and his inconstancy? Individual and universal enough to explain the recent horrifying rise in the rate of marital violence? [See Del Martin’s definitive book Battered Wives, Glide Publications, San Francisco, 1976.] Universal enough to have influenced all of twentieth-century theology? Yet this has happened, through the work of that intellectual giant, the Christian theologian Paul Tillich—he who is revealed to us with such compassionate but uncompromising honesty by his widow in her brilliant, controversial book From Time to Time (Stein and Day, New York, 1973). After his death, Hannah Tillich tells us, she “unlocked the drawers. All the girls’ photos fell out, letters and poems, passionate appeal and disgust.” There was the pornographic letter hidden under his blotter; the knowledge of his favorite fantasy of naked women, crucified, being whipped; the discovery of all the affairs, the mistresses, the sexual secretaries, the one-night stands, the abuse of the worshipful female students who had sat at his feet, his “houris … tinkling their chains.” She writes: “I was tempted to place between the sacred pages of his highly esteemed lifework these obscene signs of the real life that he had transformed into the gold of abstraction—King Midas of the spirit.” Instead, Hannah Tillich dared write a book about herself, alchemizing her own integrity out of “the piece of bleeding, tortured womanhood” she says she had become.

  So we can admit that pornography is sexist propaganda, no more and no less. (There is no comparison here with genuine erotic art—such as The Tale of Genji by Lady Shikibu Murasaki, 978–c. 1031 A.D., the great Japanese novelist of the Heian period.)

  Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice. And what a practice. The violation of an individual woman is the metaphor for man’s forcing himself on whole nations (rape as the crux of war), on nonhuman creatures (rape as the lust behind hunting and related carnage), and on the planet itself (reflected even in our language-carving up “virgin territory,” with strip mining often referred to as a “rape of the land”). Elaine Morgan, in her book The Descent of Woman (Stein and Day, New York, 1972), posits that rape was the initial crime, not murder, as the Bible would have it. She builds an interesting scientific argument for her theory. In The Mothers (1927; Grosset and Dunlap Universal Library Edition, 1963), Robert Briffault puts forward much the same hypothesis for an evolutionary “fall” from the comparable grace of the animal realm; his evidence is anthropological and mytho-historic. In more than one book, Claude Lévi-Strauss has pursued his complex theory of how men use women as the verbs by which they communicate with one another (they themselves are the nouns, of course), rape being the means for communicating defeat to the men of a conquered tribe, so overpowered that they cannot even defend “their” women from the victors. That theory, too, seems relevant here. The woman may serve as a vehicle for the rapist expressing his rage against a world which gives him pain—because he is poor, or oppressed, or mad, or simply human. Then what of her? We have waded in the swamp of compassion for him long enough. It is past time we stopped him.

  The conflict is escalating now, because we won’t cast our glances down any more to avoid seeing the degrading signs and marquees. We won’t shuffle past the vulgarity of the sidewalk verbal hassler, who is not harmless but who is broadcasting the rapist’s theory and who is backed up by the threat of capacity to carry out the practice itself. We will no longer be guilty about being victims of ghastly violations on our spirits and bodies merely because we are female. Whatever its age and origin, the propaganda and act which transform that most intimate, vulnerable, and tender of physical exchanges into one of conquest and humiliation is surely the worst example patriarchy has to offer women of the way it truly regards us.

  1974

  1 This does not mean that men in another cultural context would necessarily be the same, or that all men have acceded to the male sexual standards in this culture. Biological-determination theories will remain treacherous until we have enough feminist scientists to right the current imbalance and bias, and to create genuinely value-free research.

  2 Susan Brownmiller has since demonstrated this point in depth, with courage and clarity, in her book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1975.

  3 The New York Post of October 1, 1975, carried a story about a nationwide investigation into “snuff films” or “slashers”—pornographic movies which culminate in the actual murder and dismemberment of the actress. These movies, shot for the most part in South America, appear to be circulating, according to the Post story, on the “pornography-connoisseur circuit” where the “select clientele” can afford fifteen hundred dollars for a collection of eight reels. Four months after the Post story, a porn
movie called Snuff opened at a first-run movie theater on New York’s Broadway. Advertised as “the bloodiest thing ever filmed” this print was priced to make it available to Everyman. As usual, the message is clear through the medium.

  4 Surely the currently (1976) popular Punk Image of the half-gangster, half-fifties-high-school-dropout male is related to these themes, an image described in the Village Voice as bringing back “masculine chic.”

  LESBIANISM AND FEMINISM: SYNONYMS OR CONTRADICTIONS?

  This essay, as the opening passages make clear, was written as a speech in a departure from my usual practice of speaking extemporaneously or from notes. It was delivered as the keynote address at the West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference in Los Angeles in 1973. The division in the Feminist Movement between lesbian women on the one hand and heterosexual or bisexual women on the other had been growing and intensifying for some time, and had reached a peak that year. I knew there was really only one honorable place to engage that issue, to speak the truths I felt needed utterance. It would not be in the overground media; it had to be at that very conference. I admit, though, that the thought of expressing such intricate yet severe ideas aloud in an atmosphere which contained the crowds, infights, and festivities of a political convention combined with a tangle of correct lines as might have befitted a shag rug—this did alarm me somewhat.

  It was everything I had hoped for—and feared. Fifteen hundred women convening on the campus of UCLA, mostly white, mostly young, mostly furious, and in a celebratory mood. They came from as far away as Florida, Massachusetts, Canada, and even France because, although the conference was strictly speaking a regional event, word had got round that it was to be in actuality The Big One. This meant that everyone with a political line to put forward, a feminist project, magazine, pendant, or sweatshirt to sell, had to be there. Also anyone who was dying to see a long-lost lover, friend, relative, rival, or political enemy was revving up for the dramatic moment. Caucuses caucused all over Los Angeles, thinking up bad names to call other caucuses. Hip, garish, old L.A. itself even was a bit rocked—and women walking arm in arm were hassled and threatened more than usual. A mysterious murder with religious overtones (a cross carved on the body) had occurred in the L.A. homosexual community two days before the conference and fanatics called “Jesus freaks” were leafleting everywhere against the “Sodomite Invasion.” The conference organizers apparently had not slept for days and were speeding so fast on the requisite pills that they positively glowed from behind sunken eyepits. Finding accommodations, parking space, child care, workshop and entertainment and caucusing and plenary areas, and scheduling and rescheduling events over three days for almost two thousand militant women obviously had them so proud and so bone-tired that body and spirit would barely hold together until Monday evening.

  Friday night was reserved for arrival and registration, with some get-acquainted entertainment by lesbian-feminist performers. (Women musicians and singers had been arriving all day in gasping VW panel trucks gravid with amps.) Yet all hell broke loose that very first night, caused by the gate-crashing presence of a male transvestite who insisted that he was (1) an invited participant, (2) really a woman, and (3) at heart a lesbian. (It is, one must grant, an ingenious new male approach for trying to seduce women.) The conference promptly split-over this man. More than half the women there Friday evening demanded he be forced to leave an all-woman conference; others, into the “brotherhood of Camp”—whatever that meant—defended him as their “sister.” Some women left the conference for good, and returned to their home states in disgust. The situation was exacerbated when he insisted on performing during the entertainment. He apparently wished to embark on a nightclub career and thought this was a fine place to begin, what with both controversy and press at hand. But the genyoo-ine-real-women-lesbian entertainers present were not amused when they were asked to cede their place on the program to this man in drag. By the time I arrived, this was the issue of the conference—the one around which all hostilities and divisions magnetized. It was incredible that so many strong, angry women should be divided by one smug male in granny glasses and an earth-mother gown (he was easily identifiable, at least—he was the only person there wearing a skirt).

  I sat up half the night revising my speech so as to include the issue, trying to relate it to the points I was already endeavoring to raise, attempting to show how male “style” could be a destroyer from within.

  The next day was unforgettable. All that power and rage vibrating in surroundings of Frisbee-throwing sleepy students on their orange-grove-tacky campus of UCLA. There was no auditorium available big enough to seat such a crowd, so the keynote address had been moved outdoors, with the podium positioned halfway up a long flight of broad steps, facing a lawn where people could sit and listen. When I saw this, my heart sank. I remember exchanging glances with Margaret Sloan; both she and I knew the tactical disadvantages, which ranged from mere discomfort and annoyance (planes roaring overhead, sirens yowling on nearby streets) to more serious trouble (there was now no way of restricting the audience to women—men could wander on and off the quad as they pleased, to chant, heckle, threaten, or aim whatever other disturbances they chose at the speaker and the audience). In addition, the scene was surrounded by several low buildings on whose roofs men were already gathering—in groups, yet. The police were nowhere to be seen (they were less than welcome), but neither were there any other formal security arrangements at the conference, although about fifteen good women and true voluntarily positioned themselves near the podium, and Margaret stood close, putting on her mean-militant scowl for the occasion. I recall feeling strangely unreal, as if the whole scene were a dream, or a play—the action already “wound up tight like a spring,” needing only to uncoil into tragedy.

  We began. I can’t remember how far into the speech I had got, although others have told me it was about halfway through—when it happened. Intent on the drama unfolding before me in the audience’s concentration on my controversial words, I hardly noticed when some women squatting on the steps right in front of the podium leaped to their feet, looking not at me but behind me. Then everything was a blur of movement and people shouting and I remember whirling around, except it seemed as if my body spun in slow motion. And I saw him. He was standing at the top of the steps, a tall, exceedingly thin young man with a beard and long dark hair, wearing the soiled white robes of a Jesus freak. In one hand he carried a sign dooming the women before him to eternal hell, and in the other, the sun catching glints of it as it flashed in and out of the folds of his gown, the knife.

  Slowly, oh how slowly everyone moved, as if through stroboscopic light. He danced toward me so slowly, although his skirt flew backwards with the speed of his rush down the steps. The Angel of Death, I thought, my own gaze locked onto his demented eyes filled with woman-hatred and woman-fear.

  What have I done to you, my son, that you should hate me so?

  You have given me life. You made me live and I cannot bear it.

  Is life so terrible then, my son, my son?

  It is terrible because somewhere I have lost you and lost the way. You gave me life. Your fault, your fault.

  I stood motionless for an eternity while he moved toward me, his disgust of me and of the women on the lawn spilling tears down that gaunt face.

  He was only three steps away, they said, when they stopped him. Women. Women moving up the steps from all sides, convening on that tall frame like the Bacchae on Pentheus. I heard later that Kate Millett probably saved his life, throwing the cloak of her pacifism over the scene long enough for him to escape with only two or three Erinnyes in pursuit. Somehow, I remember asking people not to panic but to return to their places. Somehow, everyone did. Somehow, the keynote speech was continued, and finished.

  The rest of the day piled jolt upon jolt into what I could only term an emotional overload. There were women, that day and the next, who refused to leave my side. There were women I’d never met or spoken with
or seen before who came up out of nowhere and thrust armloads of flowers at me; one gave me a little silver ring, one a sketch she had done. There were other women who threatened to beat me up—for not having championed their transvestite “sister,” I gathered, or for having refused to urge lesbian feminists to seek salvation in the Young Socialists Alliance. There were tidal waves of intense love and equally intense hatred, neither of which was really meant for me but which was aimed, instead, at the woman who had ventured certain political thoughts against a current tide—and (most of all) who had almost died before their eyes.