by Robin Morgan
My point is that if even one woman last night felt that he should go, that should have been sufficient. Where The Man is concerned, we must not be separate fingers but one fist.
If transvestite or transsexual males are oppressed, then let them band together and organize against that oppression, instead of leeching off women who have spent entire lives as women in women’s bodies.
And I will not name this man who claims to be a feminist and then threatens women with federal criminal charges; I will not give him the publicity he and his straight male theatrical manager are so greedy for, at our expense. But I charge him as an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer—with the mentality of a rapist. And you women at this conference know who he is. Now. You can let him into your workshops—or you can deal with him.
And what of the straight men, the rulers, the rapists, the right-on radicals? What of the men of the Socialist Workers Party, for example, who a short two years ago refused membership to all homosexual people on the grounds that homosexuality was a decadent sickness, an evil of capitalism, a perversion that must be rooted out in all “correct socialist thinking”—who now, upon opportunistically seeing a large movement out there with a lot of bodies to organize like pawns into their purposes, speedily change their official line (but not their central-committee attitude on homosexuality), and send “their” women out to teach these poor sheep some real politics? Are we to forgive, forget, ignore? Or struggle endlessly through precious energy-robbing hours with these women, because they are after all women, even if they’re collaborating with a politics and a party based on straight white male rule? We must save our struggle for elsewhere. But it hurts—because they are women.
And this is the tragedy. That the straight men, the gay men, the transvestite men, the male politics, the male styles, the male attitudes toward sexuality are being arrayed once more against us, and they are, in fact, making new headway this time, using women as their standard-bearers.
Every woman here knows in her gut the vast differences between her sexuality and that of any patriarchally trained male’s—gay or straight. That has, in fact, always been a source of pride to the lesbian community, even in its greatest suffering. That the emphasis on genital sexuality, objectification, promiscuity, emotional noninvolvement, and coarse invulnerability, was the male style, and that we, as women, placed greater trust in love, sensuality, humor, tenderness, commitment. Then what but male style is happening when we accept the male transvestite who chooses to wear women’s dresses and makeup, but sneer at the female who is still forced to wear them for survival? What is happening when “Street Fighting Woman,” a New York all-woman bar band, dresses in black leather and motorcycle chains, and sings and plays a lot of Rolling Stones, including a racist, sexist song like “Brown Sugar” by that high priest of sadistic cock-rock, Mick Jagger. What is happening when, in a Midwest city with a strong lesbian-feminist community, men raped a woman in the university dormitory, and murdered her by the repeated ramming of a broom handle into her vagina until she died of massive internal hemorrhage—and the lesbian activists there can’t “relate” to taking any political action pertaining to the crime because, according to one of them, there was no evidence that the victim was a lesbian? But the same community can, at a women’s dance less than a week later, proudly play Jagger’s recorded voice singing “Midnight Rambler”—a song which glorifies the Boston Strangler.
What has happened when women, in escaping the patriarchally enforced role of noxious femininity, adopt instead the patriarch’s own style, to get drunk and swaggering just like one of the boys, to write of tits and ass as if a sister were no more than a collection of chicken parts, to spit at the lifetime commitment of other lesbian couples, and refer to them contemptuously as “monogs”? For the record, the anti-monogamy line originated with men, Leftist men, Weathermen in particular, in order to guilt-trip the women of their “alternative culture” into being more available victims for a dominance-based gang-rape sexuality. And from where but the male Left, male “hip” culture have we been infected with the obsession to anti-intellectualism and downward mobility? Genuinely poor people see no romanticism in their poverty; those really forced into illiteracy hardly glorify their condition. The oppressed want out of that condition—and it is contemptuous of real people’s pain to parasitically imitate it, and hypocritical to play the more-oppressed-than-thou game instead of ordering our lives so as to try and meet our basic and just needs, so that we can get on with the more important but often forgotten business of making a Feminist Revolution.
What about the life-style cop-out? The one invented by two straight white young males, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, for the benefit of other unoppressed straight white young males? What about the elite isolation, the incestuous preoccupation with one’s own clique or group or commune, one’s own bar/dancing/tripping, which led one lesbian to announce that the revolution has already been won, that she isn’t compelled, like the rest of us, to live in a man’s world any more? As Jeanne Cordova has written in The Lesbian Tide, “An example of these politics is Jill Johnston’s calling for tribes of women capable of sustaining themselves independent of the male species. How very beautiful! Truth, justice, and the womanly way! How very unreal.” And Cordova is right in pointing out that this is the “personal solution” error—the deadly trap into which so many heterosexual women have fallen. It should be obvious how painfully much everyone wants even a little happiness, peace, joy, in her life—and should have that right. But to remain convinced that your own personal mirage is a real oasis while a sandstorm is rising in the desert is both selfish and suicidal. There is a war going on, sisters. Women are being killed. And the rapist doesn’t wait to ask whether his victim is heterosexual or lesbian.
But the epidemic of male style among women doesn’t stop there. No, it is driving its reformist wedge through our ranks as well: women breaking their backs working for McGovern (only to have him laugh in their faces10); women in the lesbian community especially breaking their backs to elect almost invariably male gay legislators, or lobbying to pass bills which will, in actuality, primarily profit men.11 Myself, I have never been able to get excited over tokenism, whether it was Margaret Chase Smith in the Senate or Bernardine Dohrn in the Weather Underground, let alone a few women to give GAA a good front (which women, by the way, are finally getting wise to, and leaving), or to serve as periodic “good niggers” for the cheap porn reportage of the Advocate, Gay, Gay Sunshine, and the like.
Susan Silverwoman has written a courageous paper called “Finding Allies: The Lesbian Dilemma.” In it she writes: “Men have traditionally maintained power over women by keeping us separated. Gay men capitalized on the split between feminists and lesbians by suggesting and insisting that we [lesbians] were somehow better, basically different from straight women … Gay men preferred to think of us not as women, but as female gay men.” She goes on to say that “it is imperative that we identify with the total feminist issue … if we continue to define straight women as the enemy, rather than sisters … we rob from ourselves a movement which must be part of ourselves. We are choosing false allies when we align politically with gay men who can never understand the female experience and who, as men, have a great deal of privilege to lose by a complete liberation of women. Whether or not straight feminists come out, as potential lesbians they are far more likely to understand our experience.”
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 ma
ke 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.