by Hooks, Bell
Though compelled by serious political concerns to respond to this essay, I hesitated. Initially, I suppressed the impulse to write a response because I feared negative repercussions from black and white readers. Interrogating this fear, I saw it is as rooted in my desire to belong, to experience myself as part of a collective of black critical thinkers and not as estranged or different. And frankly, I feared punishment (i.e., not being offered desired jobs, grants, etc.). Even though I felt these fears were not rational— since I made peace long ago with the reality that dissenting opinions often make one an outsider—these fears not only made me pause; for a time they acted as censors. It troubled me that as “established” as I am, and by that I mean being a full professor with tenure, I could fear speaking my mind. I wondered how someone less established could dare to speak freely if those of us who have the least to lose are afraid to make our voices heard.
Before I began writing my response to the Gates essay, I spoke with black colleagues, many of whom also disagreed with the perspectives in the piece. Some of them openly acknowledged that they had checked their impulses to respond critically for fear of reprisals. Whether the threat of negative reprisal is real or not, black critical thinking will never openly flourish if individuals are constantly self-censoring. If black academics with greater access to mass media use their power to silence, then there is no space for the cultivation of free speech that welcomes and celebrates dissent.
Often, major black writers and academics feel that it is their responsibility to determine which voices from the margins strengthen the struggle for racial uplift and which impede the progress of the race. Comfortable with censorship when they can assert that it is in the collective interest, they do not see a connection between these actions and overall efforts to undermine free speech in this society. At a major conference focusing on the works of a prominent black woman writer, I gave a lecture espousing ideas she did not agree with. Rather than engage me in critical exchange, she “dissed” me at the end of the day. Later, she told folks that I was an “obstructionist,” someone who went about things in the wrong way. To me, this was related to my greater willingness to engage in direct confrontation of issues and her more mediated approach. Yet I felt no need to trash her. I see a place for both approaches. Older black writers and thinkers often assume a traditional, parent-like hierarchical role in relation to younger thinkers. Then there are always those individuals who remain convinced that black folks must not air our dirty laundry in public. Some of these individuals believe we must never appear to be criticizing blackness in front of white folks. While I can agree that there is always the risk that public disagreement and dissent may reinforce white racist assumptions about black identity, there are just too few all-black settings for us to maintain silence waiting for the best “politically correct” settings to speak freely and openly. Evoking “betrayal of the race” effectively acts to silence dissenting voices. Black critical thinkers, writers, academics, and intellectuals share a small universe, a world where opinions exchanged via gossip and small talk close doors, erect barriers, and exclude. The recent outraged and potentially censoring uproar over some individual black males’ “negative” responses to Toni Morrison receiving the Nobel Prize is further indication that there is more collective zeal to silence, censor, or punish speech deemed unacceptable than for dissent, free expression of ideas, and the formation of public space where folks can disagree.
Black folks do not hold public forums where we talk about ways we might promote a climate of critical discourse that supports and highlights the primacy of free speech while simultaneously furthering our struggles for black self-determination. If we do not address the issue of censorship in a thoughtful and complex manner, then old unproductive, habitual responses will determine the scope of our discourse. What cultural conditions enable black male thinkers to be critical of black women without being seen as giving expression to sexist or misogynist opinions? And what critical climate will allow black women a space to critique one another without fear that all ties will be disrupted and severed?
Usually, critique causes some pain and discomfort. I know the feeling. I will never forget the day I went to my favorite bookstore hoping to rid myself of a serious case of the blues only to open the anthology Homegirls to a passage declaring that I was “so homophobic [I] could not even bring myself to use the word lesbian”; this was part of a larger critique of my first book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. I felt devastated—not because I could not receive fierce intellectual critiques of my work, but because this particular declaration was simply untrue, yet I knew it would influence folks’ perceptions of me. I was deeply hurt. But it was up to me to cope with that hurt, put it in perspective, and respond to the issues and the individuals in an open-minded way. This is by no means an easy process. For those who are profoundly committed to free speech, to sustaining spaces for critical discourse where folks can speak their minds (hopefully constructively and in ways that do not threaten to malign and symbolically assassinate others), then there has to be a celebration of differing opinions even when there are conflicts, even when there are hurt feelings.
As a professor, I continually witness fear on the part of students to express themselves openly and freely. This fear is usually motivated by the concern that their peers will not like what they say, and that this will lead to some form of social punishment. Their willingness to self-censor in the interest of being liked, of being held in high regard by their peers, as well as their often profound fear of conflict, always indicts the notion that our classrooms are a place where the democratic assertion of free speech is possible. Professors will never create a learning community where students can understand the importance of free speech and exercise their rights to speak openly and freely if we lack the courage to fully embrace free speech. The same holds true for progressive political groups.
When repression via censorship becomes the norm in progressive political circles, we not only undermine our collective struggles to end domination, we act in complicity with that brand of contemporary, chic fascism that evokes romantic images of unity and solidarity, a return to traditional values, while working to deny free speech and suppress all forms of rebellious thought and action. In recent years, feminist thinkers have fought long and hard to make feminist thinking, theorizing, and practice a radical space of openness where critical dialogue can take place. Much of that struggle has been waged by women of color, beginning with the conflict over whether or not to see issues of race and racism as feminist agendas.
Feminist movement, black liberation struggle, and all our progressive political movements to end domination must work to protect free speech. To maintain the space for constructive contestation and confrontation, we must oppose censorship. We remember the pain of silence and work to sustain our power to speak—freely, openly, provocatively.
6
TALKING SEX
Beyond the patriarchal phallic imaginary
Women who grew to womanhood at the peak of contemporary feminist movement know that at that moment in time, sexual liberation was on the feminist agenda. The right to make decisions about our bodies was primary, as were reproductive rights, particularly the right to abort an unplanned for unwanted fetus, and yet it was also important to claim the body as a site of pleasure. The feminist movement I embraced as a young coed at Stanford University highlighted the body. Refusing to shave, we let hair grow on our legs and under our armpits. We chose whether or not to wear panties. We gave up bras, girdles, and slips. We had all-girl parties, grown-up sleepovers. We slept together. We had sex. We did it with girls and boys. We did it across race, class, nationality. We did it in groups. We watched each other doing it. We did it with the men in our lives differently. We let them celebrate with us the discovery of female sexual agency. We let them know the joys and ecstasy of mutual sexual choice. We embraced nakedness. We reclaimed the female body as a site of power and possibility.
We were the generation
of the birth-control pill. We saw female freedom as intimately and always tied to the issue of body rights. We believed that women would never be free if we did not have the right to recover our bodies from sexual slavery, from the prison of patriarchy. We were not taking back the night; we were claiming it, claiming the dark in resistance to the bourgeois sexist world of repression, order, boredom, and fixed social roles. In the dark, we were finding new ways to see ourselves as women. We were charting a journey from slavery to freedom. We were making revolution. Our bodies were the occupied countries we liberated.
It was this vision of contemporary feminist movement I shared with Esquire magazine when interviewed by Tad Friend. Consistently, I shared with him the reality that many feminists have always been and are into sex. I emphatically stated that I repudiated the notion of a “new feminism” and saw it being created in the mass media mainly as a marketing ploy to advance the opportunistic concerns of individual women while simultaneously acting as an agent of antifeminist backlash by undermining feminism’s radical/revolutionary gains. “New feminism” is being brought to us as a product that works effectively to set women against one another, to engage us in competition wars over which brand of feminism is more effective. Large numbers of feminist thinkers and activists oppose the exploitative, hedonistic consumerism that is repackaging feminism as a commodity and selling it to us full of toxic components (a little bit of poisonous, patriarchal thinking sprinkled here and there), but we feel powerless to change this trend. Many of us feel we have never had a voice in the mainstream media, and that our counterhegemonic standpoints rarely gain a wider public hearing. For years, I was among those feminist thinkers who felt reluctant to engage the mass media (by appearing on radio programs, television shows, or speaking with journalists) for fear of cooptation by editing processes which can be used to slant any message in the direction desired by the producers. That turning away from the mass media (to the degree that the mainstream media showed any interest in presenting our views) has been a gap that made it easier for reformists and liberal advocates for gender equality to assume the public spotlight and shape public opinion about feminist thinking.
The patriarchal-dominated mass media is far more interested in promoting the views of women who want both to claim feminism and repudiate it at the same time. Hence, the success of Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, and to some extent Naomi Wolf. Seen as the more liberal feminist voices countering those taken to embody strident, narrow anti-sex standpoints (e.g., Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin), these women are offered up by the white male-dominated mass media as the hope of feminism. And they are the individuals that the mass media most often turns to when it desires to hear the feminist voice speak. These women are all white. For the most part, they come from privileged class backgrounds, were educated at elite institutions, and take conservative positions on most gender issues. They in no way represent radical or revolutionary feminist standpoints. And these standpoints are the ones the mass media rarely wants to call attention to. Feminist women of color must still struggle to break through the barriers of racism and white supremacy to make our voices heard. Some of us have been willing to engage the mass media, out of fear that this “new feminism” will erase our voices and our concerns by attempting to universalize the category “woman” while simultaneously deflecting attention away from the ways differences created by race and class hierarchies disrupt an unrealistic vision of commonality.
Strategic engagement with subversive politics of representation makes it necessary for us to intervene by actively participating in mainstream public dialogues about feminist movement. It was this standpoint that informed my decision to talk with Esquire. Even though the sexist perspectives commonly conveyed by articles in this magazine made me reluctant to speak with them, I had been assured by a feminist comrade—a black female—that the white male reporter could be trusted to represent our views fairly, that his intention was not to distort, pervert or mock. When I spoke with Tad Friend, I was told that he was doing a piece on different attitudes among feminists towards sexuality. It was my understanding that this was the primary focus of his discussion. When the article appeared in the February 1994 issue of Esquire, I found my comments had been distorted, perverted—that indeed the article intentionally mocks those presumably “old feminists” who are not “down” with the pro-sex “new feminists.” Not having heard Friend use the phrase “do-me” (a bit of eating-the-other white cultural appropriation of funky black R&B I would have “dissed,” had it been shared by Tad when he spoke with me), I could not object to his use of these phrases. During our phone interview he showed no knowledge of the contributions black women had made to feminist theory, even though he positively presented himself as striving to be inclusive, a stance I welcomed. Not being in any way a manhater or a believer in racial separatism, I was pleased to engage in a discussion about feminism and sexuality with a young white male from a privileged class background who seemed genuinely interested in learning. These dialogues across difference are important for education for critical consciousness. They are necessary if we are ever to change the structures of racism, sexism, and class elitism which exclude and do not promote solidarity across difference. With generosity and warmth, I engaged in a lively discussion with Friend about feminism and sexuality.
Over and over again in our conversation, I passionately addressed the dangers of a conservative politics of representation that eagerly exploits the idea of a “new feminism” that is more pro-sex and pro-male. My repudiation of the idea of “new feminism,” as well as most of the ideas I discussed with Friend, were in no way conveyed in his article (which he never showed me before publishing). Reading the Esquire piece, I found myself and my ideas exploited in the conventional ways white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy consistently deploys to perpetuate the devaluation of feminism and black womanhood. Friend violated my confidence by doing exactly what I requested he not do, which is exploit my comments to reinforce the vision of “new feminism that is being pushed by privileged white girls.” Acting in a similar manner to that of racist white women in feminist movement, he exploited my presence and my words to appear more inclusive and therefore more politically correct even as he discounted the meaning and substance of both. Although all the white women whose words and images are highlighted used sexually explicit street vernacular in their quotes, only mine are extracted and used to “represent” my major points—even though they were actually witty asides I made to explain a point Friend claimed not to understand, to want “broken down” to a more basic level.
By highlighting this quote, making the black female’s voice and body exemplify rough, raw, vernacular speech, he continues the racist/sexist representation of black women as the oversexed “hot pussies” I critique in Black Looks, juxtaposing it, by way of contrast, with the racist/sexist image of white women as being less sexually raw, more repressed. Of course, all the white women quoted in the body of the article, speak in a graphic heterosexist vernacular. At this white male-dominated magazine, some individuals decided that it was acceptable to highlight a black female using sexually explicit speech while downplaying white women doing the same, a strategy that helps keep in place neat little racist/sexist stereotypes about the differences between white and black women. My point here is not to suggest that women should not use sexually explicit street vernacular (that was certainly one of the freedoms feminists fought for at the onset of the movement), but to interrogate the way my use of this language was distorted by a process of decontextualization.
Friend attributes to me a quote which reads: “If all we have to choose from is the limp dick or the super hard dick we’re in trouble. We need a versatile dick who admits that intercourse isn’t all there is to sexuality, who can negotiate rough sex on Monday, eating pussy on Tuesday, and cuddling on Wednesday.” Rewritten by Friend, my use of black street vernacular is turned into white parody. Never having thought that I myself “need a versatile dick,” I shared with Friend my sense t
hat heterosexual women want a man who can be versatile. To use the phrase “a versatile man” is to evoke a vision of action and agency, of male willingness to change and alter behavior. The phrase a “versatile dick” dehumanizes. Friend changed my words to make it appear that I support female objectification of men, denying their full personhood and reducing them to their anatomy. I am hard-pressed to understand how “dicks” negotiate anything, since the very word “negotiate” emphasizes communication and consent. Friend distorts this statement so as to make my words affirm identification with a phallic mindset, thereby evoking tired racist/sexist stereotypes of emasculating and castrating pseudo-masculine—and ultimately undesirable—hard, black females.
In like manner, I shared with him that “women can’t just ask men to give up sexist objectification if we want a hard dick and a tight butt—and many of us do. We must change the way we desire. We must not objectify.” Dropping the last two sentences without using punctuation to indicate that he has left something out, as well as changing my words and including his own, Friend toys with my ideas, reshaping them so that I am made to appear supportive of patriarchal notions of sexual pleasure and sexist/heterosexist thinking that I in no way condone. Yet, despite Friend’s deliberate distortion of my highlighted quote, its radical intentionality remains intact. It makes clear that sexist men must undergo a process of feminist revolution if they want to be capable of satisfying the needs of feminist women who experience our most intense sexual pleasure in an oppositional space outside the patriarchal phallic imaginary. It is this feminist vision of liberatory heterosexuality that seems to terrify men.
No wonder, then, that women who want to be sexual with men are perversely reinventing feminism so that it will satisfy patriarchal desires, so that it can be incorporated into a sexist phallic imaginary in such a way that male sexual agency as we now know it will never need to change. Representing a larger structure of white male power, Tad Friend, in conjunction with those who edited and published this piece, show contempt for any radical or revolutionary feminist practice that upholds dialogue and engagement with men, that sees men as comrades in struggle. Contrary to what this magazine and the mass media in general project in complicity with opportunistic white female allies (e.g., Camille Paglia, Naomi Wolf), older feminists like myself were supporting the inclusion of men in feminist movement (actually writing and publishing articles to push this point) years ago. Contrary to Esquire’s suggestion that there is “a new generation of women, who are embracing sex (and men!),” we are witnessing a new generation of women who, like their sexist male counterparts, are aggressively ahistorical and unaware of the long tradition of radical/revolutionary feminist thought that celebrates inclusiveness and liberatory sexuality. Both these groups prefer to seek out the most conservative, narrow-minded feminist thought on sex and men, then arrogantly use these images to represent the movement.