by Robin Morgan
The possibility of their naked minds and bodies engaging one another—a joyous competition which must include any assumption of defeat as (1) temporary and (2) utterly lacking in humiliation; of any triumph as, obversely, impermanent and meaningless. The taking and giving of turns.
Man has tried to impersonate such a consort, challenge, equal. He has feared his inability to succeed. He has feared as well the possibility of his succeeding, because this contains a potential power equal to that of Woman. He fears having such power. He fears not having such power.
Yet this is the balance she has been searching for. It is the balance he seems unable, deeply, to conceive. It is too terrifying. But the appearance of it, this he can manage. Will this suffice her? He attempts to fabricate it.
Thus is born: the rakish smile, the arched eyebrow and narrow-eyed intense stare, the attitude which bluffs, “I know what you really think/feel/desire, my dear” (or, depending on the class and delivery, “I know what you are/want, baby”). This is soon followed by—and notice the shift—“I know you better than you know yourself.”
Woman, after centuries (years of one human life) of trying to reveal to Man or obtain from him the authentic response, begins to settle for even the pretense, finding it, in lack of what she truly wishes, somewhat stimulating—though merely as a synthetic approximation. She resigns herself almost humorously, to indulge him, to grant him a respite from effort. But she never mistakes it for the real thing and is therefore not (yet) degraded by it. Furthermore, she assumes it to be a temporary solution. Consequently, even at this stage, the tragedy could be averted, innocence retained, and the game gracefully played out.
But Man does forget (or deliberately blurs or ignores) that the pretense is not the reality, that it is merely a game. Because he forgets this, he therefore does see it as degrading to Woman. This was what she meant by the complement, the equal partner? How shallow of her! Such judgment after such mis-memory begins to be in Man’s self-interest. He sees this both in confusion and in clarity. In confusion, he thinks it the best way to win her interest (“being sexy”). In clarity, he understands that this is a way to relate to her without ceding—in fact while gaining—a new-found power, one she did not intend him to have. That is, he can still claim to be trying to satisfy her requirement (the pretense) but can afford to be lazy about the intricate difficulty of her real demand.
Woman notices this change and chafes against it, beginning to learn fear in this either-way-you-lose dynamic: she can give up all hope of Man’s really “knowing” her, hope of finding her consort, of being able to rest her burdens without it being seen as weakness, of encountering her complementary equal; but this ceding of hope would clearly be a real defeat. Or she can acquiesce to his pretense as the real and concede that as the best excitement available. This is surely another defeat. She begins to feel something alien to her. She begins to feel degraded.
This was not necessary …
Man has three choices in reaction to this, each of which mirrors three phases in history, as well as what we might characterize as three types of men:
1. He notices the shift in Woman (as she begins to learn how to feel degraded) and finds that he gets heightened pleasure from her realization of her degradation. We can represent this choice as early, vengeful patriarchal revolution in an historical sense, and we can recognize it as the quintessential sadist in an individual sense.
2. He doesn’t even notice the shift, so immersed is he by now in his own version of reality. We can characterize this phase as middle patriarchy consolidating itself and reigning in confidence. In the individual it appears as the “normal” masculinist male whose dullard mentality has cleverly developed the nonresponse (silence and passive-aggression) into a loudly articulated technique.
3. He secretly begins to despair that Woman, after eons (decades of her life, decades) of striving to teach him the real thing, is now giving up and settling him, dooming him, into his own pretense, with no hope from her of transcending it. He misses the excitement of the battle, but misses even more the loss of hope. This tendency might characterize the man in struggle, although it may be optimistic to expand that into a symbol of late, dissolving (?) patriarchy. It would be more reasonable, perhaps, to say that the approximations of the present period (effeminism and other sincerely supportive male replies to feminism, few as they are) presage such a reality—an actual surfacing of already subconscious tendencies in men.
But now Woman is degraded—in her view of herself, and in her view of his view of her.
How can he think I would settle for this?
To survive this realization, she must convince herself first of its irrelevance and then even of its inevitability, and construct an effective pleasure out of that very situation. This is the only way she can retain any pride. She even feels an echo of some ancient, almost forgotten, freedom, power, and creativity in the way she has instinctively known how to divert her pain into pleasure.
I remember this. My cells remember this …
All along, Man has not known her, not understood any of her real unshameful free unsullied desires. Now that he has corrupted his own attempts to fulfill them, he must castigate her for accepting such a cheapened solution as that which he offers. This he begins to enjoy, but even more important, to mean. He has forgotten that there ever was a game.
He glimpses that only she holds the key which can unlock them both from these postures. Yet all of his energies are bent on convincing her that, while she indeed holds the key, she has no power to use it.
Because she may be wrong. Because I may not be as she is. Because I may not be capable …
This construct, of remembering and refeeling her own power but being unable to act on it, drives Woman literally mad with longing. The one connective route along which she actually can exercise her power now is to demand degradation from Man. She is certain that this at least will be a “successful” exercise of that power.
Thus her ultimate shame contains within it some pure act risked in disguise of her ultimate power. She celebrates this gift with orgasm.
Simultaneously, his ultimate triumph contains within it some dread act attempted in disguise of his ultimate defeat. He mourns this loss with orgasm.
He has not yet learned an old lesson she has tried to teach him for ages.
She has learned a new lesson, and will find in it an ingenious strengthening, enabling herself to continue trying to teach him the ancient game she has never really forgotten.
In her refusal to release him into his own destruction she exercises over him that power of which he has been afraid from the beginning. His sole power exists in not seeing this.
This I remember.
What if she is wrong?
Years. Decades. Eons. History.
1 A variation on this is the hypothesis of Signe Hammer as put forth in “The Rape Fantasies of Women: Up from Disrepute” (Village Voice, April 5, 1976). Ms. Hammer, in an intelligent but too-brief essay, posits that “Our basic rape fantasy reflects our anxiety about asserting ourselves in all areas—in work, sex, and relationships” (italics mine). This is a refreshing advance beyond the Freudian-influenced strictly sexual interpretation. It also provokes the startling thought that assertive women in general and feminists in particular might be especially prey to such culturally implanted self-punishing devices. Molly Haskell, in an essay in Ms. (November 1976) analyzes rape fantasies as they have been exploited and distorted by the film industry, and reaches an interesting set of conclusions directly related to Signe Hammer’s theory.
2 Monster, p. 33.
3 Lady of the Beasts (Random House, New York, 1976), p. 61. First published in American Poetry Review, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1976.
4 In Monster, p. 3. First published by The Sewanee Review in 1965.
5 It is more direct to simplify all the plots into a verbal shorthand for which we may use the words “dominance” and “submission.” If this disappoints some readers I am sorry, but they must look e
lsewhere for their pleasure. The silly—or gory—details are of little consequence here, because even if there is a differing of intensity in the various fantasies (I learned that mine were quite tame compared to the branding irons of other imaginations) the quality, the message, the politics are identical. It is generally more useful to focus on the connectives among oppressed peoples, and leave emphasizing the differences to the oppressor. He does it so well, anyway.
6 I do not use this term pejoratively, but rather in accordance with the express wish of most radical anti-sexist homosexual males. By calling themselves “faggots,” they affirm those homosexual males persecuted in the Middle Ages: “When a woman was to be burned as a witch, men accused of homosexuality were bound and mixed with the bundles of kindling (faggots) at the feet of the witch, and set on fire ‘to kindle a flame foul enough for a witch to burn in.’ So the enemy has always seen that strong women and gentle men are a real threat to masculine domination.” This quote is from Double-F, A Magazine of Effeminism. See footnotes on Double-F in “Lesbianism and Feminism,” above.
7 Ironically, during 1976, and with the sudden intensity of a fad, sado masochistic practice erupted as a political issue in lesbian-feminist circles. Articles in the so-called mixed-gay media, as well as in women’s newspapers such as Big Mama Rag, Hera, and Off Our Backs extolled or condemned these practices, yet repeatedly failed to probe for an analysis, taking sides, instead, on whether such acts were (1) politically correct, (2) inherently classist or racist, and (3) permissible for lesbians but not for anybody else. No one seemed particularly concerned with the implications of radical-chic in this new issue, or with its echoes of the current Decadent Camp fashion, the Punk Image, the Mick Jagger message, and other such related themes already mentioned in “Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape.” Further, no one seemed to question whether this controversy was linked to a recent reidentification with male homosexuals (among whom such practice was more openly affirmed by a larger number for a longer time)—a possible by-product of the new “bonding” within the “gay community,” a way of gaining male approval from many homosexual “brothers.” In other words, no one appeared to wonder whether this S-M proliferation was a lesbian copy of a faggot imitation of patriarchal backlash against feminism.
8 When I speak of “patriarchal heterosexuality” I mean just that—the current institution of heterosexuality as defined in our androcentric culture. I see no reason to assume that heterosexuality under other conditions, in which women had free choice and self-determining power, would be oppressive. On the contrary, I believe it could become Edenically joyous again.
9 I refer the reader to Gertrude Lenzer’s essay “On Masochism” and to Julia Sherman’s “Commentary” in reply, in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, Vol. I, Nos. 2 and 4, respectively. Lenzer has written an interesting paper connecting male masochism with the German sensibility between the wars; Sherman, in her reply, questions Lenzer’s emphasis (like so much of the psychiatric literature) on masochism in men when the culture generally considers masochism female. Sherman points out that Kinsey’s statistics show males to be more masochistic than females, yet notes that the term itself has come to be generalized and more “naturally” applied to women for, we might well gather, reasons more political than scientific.
10 This concept was perfected in its expression by D. H. Lawrence’s “character” John Thomas in Lady Chatterly’s Lover—the penis as a separate self with “a will and a mind of its own.”
PARANOIA: THE PARADIGM AND THE PARABLE
A twofold initiation was central to the mysteries the sixties and the early seventies taught me. During that time I discovered the reality of my own suffering as a woman, and I began to comprehend how that suffering was related to, by, and in, the historic world. This process one could call Feminism. Further, I discovered my own reaction to that reality and how that was related to, by, and in the world. This revelation one might call Paranoia.
Many of us are familiar with the poster which shows a drawing of a haggard but still vigilant face beneath which the legend reads, “Even paranoids have real enemies.” Just so. And how to differentiate? Can madness be “political”? Fanon, the Algerian revolutionist-psychiatrist, devoted more than one book to the subject, observing that “What is madness to the mother country is sanity to the colony—and the reverse.” (As women, we must translate again: father country is simply more accurate—men run patriarchy.) Later, purportedly radical psychiatrists (R. D. Laing, David Cooper, and Thomas Szasz, among others), began to analyze madness anew from these psycho-political perspectives. Szasz, for example, has questioned which was objectively more insane: the so-called witch hysteria of mass hallucinations which swept parts of Europe during the Middle Ages, or the “sane” response of church and state—mass persecution, torture, imprisonment, and burning? Szasz, who cannot see witchcraft in its religio-political dimensions, does note that the word “hysteria” is itself a misogynistic one, from the Greek or hystera meaning the womb; incredibly, this suggests not much more to the good doctor, who emerges with his sexist blinders intact, seeing no further connections.
Other, more drastically experimental psychiatrists have carried their political analysis to an extreme, almost to an adoration of madness as the only sane state in existence. At first this appears refreshingly intelligent, but a closer examination of the practice which follows this theory is less salutary. It can give madness a quality of radical chic, and create the inverse effect of another correct line similar to that of “sexual liberation.” This last, you recall, was: “If you don’t screw everyone in sight, you’re hung up.” The sanity version goes: “If you don’t hallucinate continually, you’re crazy.” (Or: This is the way the world ends—not with a Laing, with a Cooper.)
But the person paralyzed in the grip of a negative schizophrenic hallucination (whether drug-induced or other) or reeling through the baroque architecture of a paranoid perception has seen madness not as a liberating state but rather one from which to be liberated with all due possible speed and by any means necessary. Such means include any help available, even those unimaginative, metallic, authoritarian doctors whose medical and psychiatric Big Business is justly feared and detested. And it is usually, and tragically, they who are available, since the industry of mental health is not coincidentally under their control. Real alternatives to this cartel are only beginning to function; feminist therapy, as an example, is in the process of defining itself.1 For the moment, then, one’s choice lies between the devil and the deep blue he. There is the pompous ass who aims to “normalize” his (sic) patient—to make the housewife more content with her namelessness, to bring the homosexual to an aversion of her or his own sexuality, to patronize the child, to cool out the adolescent, to tranquilize the rebel, to induce drug comas in the bothersome elderly—and to write books and papers, appear on talk shows, and keep his own malpractice rates low. The other choice lies with the self-styled radical shrink, who is also usually male (surprise!); he sports a dirty ponytail instead of a bald fringe, speaks in language that unwittingly parodies himself as a Jules Feiffer character, and chuckles at his patient disapprovingly if she confesses to a bad trip. “You didn’t let yourself go,” he lectures her, one of his hairy hands gumming its way up her thigh as he oozles. Is it greediness to feel that such choices are insufficient?
I discovered my own “madness” during the sixties, via hallucinogenic soft drugs such as acid (LSD), mescaline, and peyote, as well as the stand-by of my generation—grass. I never took hard drugs, both from great fear of them and even greater respect for my own body. Nor did I ever take drugs lightly. They were, for me, tickets to a psychic and religious space. Of the multitudinous experiences I encountered during this period, while tripping and sober (silly word) I’ve written elsewhere,2 and without doubt shall do so again. Many of these experiences were ecstatic, lyrical, hilarious, peaceful, and wholly good. Quite frankly, though, I have had just as ecstatic, lyrical, etc. experiences w
ith no drug inducing them—unless one considers a country dawn or childbirth or Elizabethan lute music or an act of love-making drugs. So more from a sense of, I hope, investigation than from a preoccupation with the grim, I include here some writings on the negative side of that experience. For it was without question hallucinogenic drugs which first introduced me to the real state of paranoia. I don’t mean paranoia as a cocktail-party phrase, or in a clinical sense, or in any other loose parlance. I mean paranoia as a system of perception in which everything in the entire universe seems intricately—and horribly—enclosed.
The following piece is about that system. The first part is based on a series of notes I rapidly made while “in” the state itself (a writer is a writer is a writer after all). These notes expanded, as an exorcise-exercise over subsequent months, especially as I compared experiences with other women and found that for many of us, the Stoned Sixties were less than groovy. Many men, for instance, simply substituted drugs for alcohol and proceeded to use this substance the way their square fathers had: to pressure and seduce (read: rape) women. If the women freaked out about this, you guessed it—we were hung up. For every woman who has recognized the religious and philosophical ecstasy shyly articulated in poems of mine like “Revolucinations” or “Credo,” five women have apparently identified with the “bad trip” revolving around sex and powerlessness depicted in my longer poem “War Games.” It was a not-uncommon experience, and the misuse of drugs by men against women for sexual purposes continues, viciously, to this day.
I set the task for myself of, as I saw it, “wooing” my madness and putting it to use. Awful as it was and loath as I am ever to return to it, I nevertheless would not have missed it for anything—and I somehow had the sense to know that at the time, even when I desperately wanted Out. I was fortunate; when I refer to my “madness” (and I shall now drop the coy quotation marks), I’m referring always to temporary states (drug-induced or spontaneous) never longer than twelve hours and often of only a moment’s duration, never more frequent than perhaps fifty times in all, over a period of almost ten years. These states occurred in the company of loving family or friends (even if I didn’t see them that way at the time), and I was never tranquilized (other than vitamin C or a Valium, self-requested, at home; never hospitalized or institutionalized). Very fortunate, much more so than others of my generation. “She calls this her madness?” you sneer? ’Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.