The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  In 1971, feminists convened a conference on prostitution in New York City. Kate Millett, who chronicled the conference in The Prostitution Papers (1971), described how “all hell broke loose—between the prostitutes and the movement.” Although skeptical, the prostitutes had come to the conference as working women, “in the life,” looking for support in a difficult and dangerous trade. They were not simply movement women who had once turned a trick or two. “They had a great deal to say,” reported Millett, “about the presumption of straight women who fancied they could debate, decide, or even discuss what was their situation and not ours. The first thing they could tell us—the message coming through a burst of understandable indignation—was that we were judgmental, meddlesome, and ignorant.” For some feminists, prostitution seemed like the quintessential exploitation of women. In the eyes of the disgusted prostitutes, the movement women reminded them of the middle-class wives and mothers who tried to drive them out of their neighborhoods.116

  The gulf between prostitutes and movement women proved impassable. Both groups agreed that prostitution should be decriminalized, but for radically different reasons. Prostitutes demanded safer working conditions for an ongoing trade; feminists wanted to abolish prostitution altogether. Alix Kates Shulman recalled that after several prostitutes described the working conditions they wanted, “one feminist jumped onto the stage, and said, well, why are you prostitutes? Why aren’t you making a living some other way? Like, as a file clerk.”117 Millett wrote:

  In the interminable “just let me finish my point” vs. “Baby you don’t know where it’s at” that prolonged itself in doorways and staircases . . . we were at last becoming persons to each other. There was a gulf . . . but it was closing.

  Or so Millett hoped. But the next day, the conference spiraled out of control. The prostitutes bristled at the day’s program, titled “Towards the Elimination of Prostitution.” To add insult to injury, the panel of “experts” included not one prostitute. Millett reported that “a few prostitutes arrived late and after some hesitation, were allowed to sit on the platform. The panel then fell into ‘tedious bickering.’ The audience, outraged by the growing chaos, began forming long lines to speak into microphones.” Millett watched the conference disintegrate into accusations and recriminations:

  Everyone talked. No one made any sense. Things rapidly degenerated into chaos. . . . Beyond the absurdly hypothetical threat posed by the term “elimination” . . . was the greater threat of adverse judgment by other women. For if large numbers of “straight” women congregate to agree that there is an absolute benefit in the elimination of prostitution—what does this convey to the prostitute? . . . that she is despised and rejected by her sister women. Never mind if this makes no sense—it was there like an edict upon the heart.

  The more feminists argued, the more prostitutes viewed them as ignorant moralists. In the heat of the moment, some feminists revealed their real feelings of revulsion toward prostitution and then were shocked when pandemonium broke out. The shrillness of the organizers was matched by the even shriller shouts of the prostitutes.

  The accusation so long buried in liberal good will or radical rhetoric—“You’re selling it, I could too, but I won’t”—was finally heard. Said out loud at last. The rejection and disapproval which the prostitutes have sensed from the beginning . . . is now present before us, a palpable force in the air. There is fighting now in earnest. Someone is struck, the act obscene, irreparable. Attempts at reconciliation are futile. . . . The afternoon is in shambles.

  “It was simply too early,” Millett sadly concluded. Perhaps, but American feminists have a long history of lacking genuine empathy with prostitutes. During the first two decades of the century, feminists played a decisive role in ensuring that prostitution became illegal. Now, during the second wave of feminism, many feminists again found the idea of women selling sex unacceptable. The “whore stigma” scared many of them away. The sexual revolution had not erased memories of good and bad girls, especially for white middle-class women. But Flo Kennedy, one of the movement’s sassiest, most outspoken veterans of the civil rights and women’s movements, pointed out that “feminists always talk about prostitutes getting beaten up by the pimps, but statistically women get beaten up even more by their husbands.”118

  In contrast to American feminists, Dutch and French activists created encounter groups with prostitutes, and in some European cities, feminists and prostitutes worked together in coalitions to improve the working conditions of sex workers. In America, the legacy of American Victorian values, as well as feminists’ ambivalent attitudes toward the sexual revolution, combined to push prostitution to the bottom of the feminist agenda, a subject rarely raised except as an issue of “sexual slavery.”

  Deeply disappointed, Millett wrote, “It may be that the West Coast will get it together before we do in the East.” She was right. In San Francisco, the flamboyant and politically astute Margo St. James, herself a former prostitute, organized a union of prostitutes in 1973 called COYOTE, an acronym that stood for “Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics.” COYOTE successfully provided prostitutes with adequate counsel and persuaded public defenders to prosecute crimes that had actual victims. COYOTE also convinced some municipal judges to release prostitutes arrested on routine street sweeps on their own recognizance. In Seattle, Jennifer James, another former prostitute and advocate, pulled together a similar union. Over the decade, unions of prostitutes that sought decriminalization began appearing in major cities in Europe as well. Not surprisingly, only a few American feminists actively became involved in lending their support.

  The subject of pornography polarized the women’s movement much more than prostitution, turning friends into enemies, and persuading some outsiders that a feminist was just another name for a prude who wore sensible shoes. In the earliest years of the movement, feminists had felt queasy about denouncing pornography for fear of appearing “straight” and prudish. Robin Morgan recalled that “there was a time when rape and pornography were embarrassing issues even in the Women’s Movement . . . such things were deplorable . . . but they had to be explored with a sophisticated snicker—not with outspoken fury.” Morgan’s famous statement, “Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice,” captured an idea that would only grow in the movement—that the cultural dehumanization of the female body was a precondition for and invitation to commit violence against women.119

  In 1976, the release of Snuff, a pornographic film that sexualized the torture and evisceration of women, sparked the organization of the first feminist antipornography organization. That same year, feminists in the San Francisco Bay Area created Women Against Violence in Pornography and the Media, sponsored a national conference, “Feminist Perspectives on Pornography,” and organized the first “Take Back the Night” march. In New York City, another group, Women Against Pornography, organized biweekly “tours” of the prostitution and pornography trade in Times Square.120

  Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, two leaders whose names became closely associated with the movement, reframed pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights. To those who remained unconvinced, they explained that the objectification and dehumanization of women reduced them to “things and objects,” which made it much easier for men to batter, exploit, and rape them. According to MacKinnon, pornography inspired violent fantasies that men might then act out on women they knew or even on strangers. In Minneapolis, MacKinnon and Dworkin tried to secure an antipornography municipal ordinance that would have allowed women to take action against pornographers for the injuries they sustained if raped. MacKinnon, an imaginative and original thinker, eventually pushed the argument against pornography even further.121 In a controversial work, Only Words, she made the argument that the representation of violence against women was as dangerous as actual violence itself.

  An example cited by Andrea Dworkin was the pornographic film Deep Throat, which glorified a woman’s ability to open up her throat to g
ive her lover maximum pleasure. “We see an increase since the release of Deep Throat in throat rape—where women show up in the emergency room because men believe they can penetrate, deep-thrust, to the bottom of a woman’s throat.” Linda Lovelace, the woman who had starred in the film, later wrote of her pimp’s brutality and the near-suffocation she suffered while pretending to enjoy herself. According to Dworkin, that film alone increased the popularity of throat rape in pornographic literature. An example:

  He could kill me with [his cock], she thought. He didn’t need a gun in his hand. . . . She swallowed and swallowed at each of his forward thrusts, but her throat wouldn’t stretch large enough to accommodate him. It wasn’t until he grabbed her hair with his left fist and held her head against the force of his tool that she was able to relax her throat muscles enough that his cock raped its way over her tongue and buried itself in the passage to her stomach. Pain seared through her throat like she had swallowed a hot branding iron as her throat stretched to its maximum capacity. . . . She nursed greedily at his body.122

  The antipornography movement grew at a furious pace in the early 1980s. Meanwhile, a group of feminist intellectuals and activists, who did not necessarily approve of or like pornography, began to argue that feminists ought to mobilize to protect the rights and working conditions of sexual workers in the industry. They accused MacKinnon and Dworkin of attempting to protect women by thoroughly desexualizing them, by embracing Victorian ideals of women’s passionlessness, encouraging censorship, and exaggerating the sexual slavery that held women who worked in the pornographic film industry in bondage. Fearing censorship, these activists worried that any attempt to weaken the First Amendment—such as banning pornography—would likely be used against feminists, Marxists, and gays and lesbians. They also worried that their opponents had recast sex as an exclusively dangerous and frightening activity.

  The “anti-anti-pornography movement” drew a variety of activists into its orbit. In 1981, Gayle Rubin, Amber Hollibaugh, and Deirdre English published an article titled “Talking Sex,” in which they attacked the antiporn movement for equating sex with abuse and humiliation. Ellen Willis argued that like many other women, she enjoyed pornography (even if that meant enjoying a rape fantasy) and that it intensified her life as a rebel. Ann Snitow thought that feminists’ excavations of male violence had “frightened themselves.” “Visibility,” she wrote, “had created a new consciousness, but also new fear—and new forms of old sexual terror: It was almost as if, by naming sexual crimes, by ending female denial, we frightened ourselves more than anyone else.”123

  At times, the pornography wars seemed to deepen the gulf between straight women and lesbians. An unforgettable scene at a conference on pornography typified the passion and anger that the topic seemed to arouse. As Susan Brownmiller remembered it, “There was one [lesbian] sitting in front who started to bait me. Finally, she got up and took the microphone and said, ‘We do all the work in this movement and you go home and suck cock.’ And I said ‘If you hate men so much, why are you dressed in men’s clothes?’”124

  But lesbians didn’t always agree about sex either. While many supported the antipornography movement, others demanded an acceptance of a broad repertoire of sexual practices. The invention of the “political lesbian,” these women argued, had created an unrealistic cuddly and snuggly view of lesbian sex. They thought it was time for lesbians to “get real” and openly accept the world of down-and-dirty sex, including sadomasochism, with its whips and other sexual toys. These “sex radicals,” as they called themselves, came to champion any kind of consensual sex. Pat Califia, Joan Nestle, Gayle Rubin, and Amber Hollibaugh, among other advocates, argued that the antiporn movement discriminated against sexual minorities. In “Pornography and Pleasure,” Paula Webster described her impatience with the antiporn movement for condemning “voyeurism, bondage, s/m, fetishism, pornography, promiscuity, and intergenerational sex as incomprehensible.”125

  The pornography wars fought by feminists invariably trivialized and simplified the ideas of both sides. Each group, riding high on self-righteousness, accused the other of condescending attitudes toward sexual workers. Many misconceptions swirled around the antipornography movement. Most of its activists were neither “prudes” nor advocates of censorship. Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon hardly spoke for all feminists on the issue of pornography. Some feminists argued that poverty, not pornography, should be the movement’s greatest priority. But the antipornography movement also exposed the dangers that many sex workers did face, including torture and slavery, and highlighted the impact of hard-core pornographic films that sexualized the subjugation, degradation, and even the death of women.126

  IT SEEMED LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED

  At the end of the 1970s, feminists were deeply divided about sexual matters. Was sex mainly a dangerous or a pleasurable activity? Had the sexual revolution brought liberation or exploitation?127 Feminists didn’t agree, but neither did the rest of the nation. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the rising political power of the New Right, the feminist “sex wars” merged into the larger cultural wars.

  Oddly enough, pundits and journalists didn’t seem to notice that feminists had unearthed so many hidden injuries or that they had spent the decade trying to find some kind of equality within the sexual revolution. Instead, journalists and pundits happily buried the decade as though nothing of significance had occurred. The seventies, they said with a sigh of relief, were finally over. They were tired of Americans indulging in narcissistic psychological explorations or soaking in hot tubs.

  Perhaps this was an accurate depiction of a small, elite group of journalists and others who had the wealth to own, and the time to sit in, hot tubs. But those years, arguably the most intellectually vital and exciting ones in the history of American women, also witnessed an amazing array of revelations and changes in social, political, and public thought and policy.

  Paradoxically, the exposure of so many crimes and secrets did little to cast feminists as agents of change. Although activists challenged all kinds of received wisdom, including the language permitted by men on the street, in the bedroom, in the office, and in political office, the cumulative impact of all these revelations also helped implant an image of women as passive victims of villainous men. By the 1990s, for example, many young women possessed an awareness of date rape and sexual harassment inconceivable to their mothers, but they also viewed sex (exacerbated by the fear of AIDS) largely as a dangerous activity. In a culture increasingly titillated by victimology, the image of woman as victim received far more publicity than stories that recounted feminists’ courageous determination to challenge the norms and customs of American culture and society.128

  Most women, of course, suffered not from pornography, but from poverty and unemployment. But rape, incest, battering, homophobia, prostitution, pornography, and sexual harassment had also ruined the lives of countless women of all classes. The excavation of the hidden injuries of sex underscored the inadequacies of the male sexual revolution, redefined certain customs as crimes, and ultimately redrew the political and social agenda of American political culture.

  The disillusioned liberal and New Left women who began the women’s movement had come a long way in little more than a decade. They had gained a new sense of political entitlement. They newly recognized that genuine emancipation required that the state protect women’s rights—as wives and mothers, as workers and lovers, as students and dreamers, and, of course, as citizens. Nothing less would do. As taboo subjects turned into talk show topics, American women began to view their lives through new eyes. Rage replaced shame. Entitlement supplanted despair. Activism led to pride. Nothing would ever seem quite the same again.

  Chapter Six

  PASSION AND POLITICS

  Sixteen years ago, the young woman emigrated from Vietnam, a toddler in a boat filled with refugees and rats. Now she is a university undergraduate, eager to understand the alien political cultur
e of her adopted country. One day, after class, she asks the simplest of all questions, to which no simple answers are available: “What was the women’s movement like?”

  No matter what I say, she looks increasingly bewildered. From her, I learn that the only way to convey a sense of the women’s movement is to evoke the passions that made the movement the stuff of high drama—euphoric exhilaration, murderous rage, romantic rejection, apocalyptic expectation, squandered opportunity, unexpected possibility.

  CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING

  Much of this drama resulted from seeing the world through new eyes. In 1968, Carol Hanisch, a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1964-1965, a member of Gainesville Women’s Liberation and then New York Radical Women, coined the slogan “The personal is political.” By this, she meant to convey the then-shocking idea that there were political dimensions to private life, that power relations shaped life in marriage, in the kitchen, the bedroom, the nursery, and at work. Politics existed beyond Congress, beyond global affairs. Kathie Sarachild (formerly Amatniek), a peace activist at Harvard and a civil rights organizer in Mississippi, became a member of the New York Radical Women, and then the Redstockings. It was Sarachild who coined the term “consciousness-raising,” the process by which women in small groups could explore the political aspects of personal life. Building on SNCC’s tradition of “speaking truth to power,” Sarachild understood that women would see the reality of their lives only when they grasped that their problems were not theirs alone. By sharing life stories and questioning the “natural order of things,” women could begin to see their condition through their own eyes. In a number of articles, she suggested topics for small groups to explore, including family life, work, sex, health, and education. Why, for example, did men enjoy more leisure time? Why were women’s nimble fingers considered perfectly suited for making small widgets on an assembly line, but not for neurosurgery? Why did women clean the toilet while men cut the grass? Why did employers pay women less than men for the same work? Why did schools routinely steer girls toward teaching and nursing?1