"Goodbye to all that."

[Athelwulf]

I've been mulling an essay lately. It's not at all related to the GLBT cause, rather to feminism, but it's got some damn powerful rhetoric.

I've been feeling powerless lately. I'm greatly disappointed by Prop 8, Arizona's and Florida's equivalent amendments, and Arkansas's ban on adoption, and frustrated by the fact that these are just the latest affronts on the rights of me and my brothers and sisters. I've been lurking on this forum, not venturing out much into the others, reading about the horrible treatment we get in General Discussion or elsewhere (I don't dare read it for myself, out of concern for my blood pressure). On a Democratic discussion board, no less. It's disgusting.

Some writings in the GLBT forum are inspiring me. So I've saved several links and printed out particularly notable posts so I can mull over them, dissect them, and learn different ways to articulate what everyone else, as well as I, is feeling. And then I remembered an essay I stumbled upon nearly a year ago. Below are a link and some key excerpts. Sorry there are so many: I'm horrible at summarizing.

Please tell me what you think.

"Goodbye to All That," by Robin Morgan.

And that's what I wanted to write about — the friends, brothers, lovers in the counterfeit male-dominated Left. The good guys who think they know what "Women's Lib," as they so chummily call it, is all about — who then proceed to degrade and destroy women by almost everything they say and do: The cover on the last issue of Rat (front and back). The token "pussy power" or "clit militancy" articles. The snide descriptions of women staffers on the masthead. The little jokes, the personal ads, the smile, the snarl. No more, brothers. No more well-meaning ignorance, no more cooptation, no more assuming that this thing we're all fighting for is the same; one revolution under man, with liberty and justice for all. No more.

Let's run it down.

It seems obvious that a legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, yellow, red, and white women — with men relating to that the best they can. A genuine Left doesn't consider anyone's suffering irrelevant or titillating. . .

"Left Out!" — not Right On! — to the Weather Sisters who (and they know better — they know) reject their own radical feminism for that last desperate grab at male approval that we all know so well, for claiming that the machismo style and the gratuitous violence is their own style by "free choice," and for believing that this is the way for a woman to make their revolution. . . . Left Out, my sister — don't you see? Goodbye to the illusion of strength when you run hand in hand with your oppressors; goodbye to the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you anything but gonorrhea.

Goodbye to Hip culture and the so-called Sexual Revolution, which has functioned toward women's freedom as did the Reconstruction toward former slaves — reinstituting oppression by another name.

Goodbye to lovely "pro-Women's Liberationist" Paul Krassner, with all his astonished anger that women have lost their sense of humor "on the issue" and don't laugh any more at little funnies that degrade and hurt them: farewell to the memory of his "Instant Pussy" aerosol-can poster, to his column for the woman-hating men's magazine Cavalier, to his dream of a Rape-In against legislators' wives, to his Scapegoats and Realist Nuns and cute anecdotes about the little daughter he sees as often as any properly divorced Scarsdale middle-aged father; goodbye forever to the notion that a man is my brother who, like Paul, buys a prostitute for the night as a birthday gift for a male friend, or who, like Paul, reels off the names in alphabetical order of people in the women's movement he has fucked, reels off names in the best locker-room tradition — as proof that he's no sexist oppressor.

Let it all hang out. Let it seem bitchy, catty, dykey, Solanisesque, frustrated, crazy, nutty, frigid, ridiculous, bitter, embarrassing, man-hating, libelous, pure, unfair, envious, intuitive, low-down, stupid, petty, liberating. We are the women that men have warned us about.

To hell with the simplistic notion that automatic freedom for women — or nonwhite peoples — will come about zap! with the advent of a socialist revolution. Bullshit. Two evils pre-date capitalism and clearly have been able to survive and post-date socialism: sexism and racism. . . . Goodbye to those simple-minded optimistic dreams of socialist equality all our good socialist brothers want us to believe. How merely liberal a politics that is!

I once said, "I'm a revolutionary, not just a woman," and knew my own lie even as I said the words. The pity of that statement's eagerness to be acceptable to those whose revolutionary zeal no one would question, i.e., any male supremacist in the counterleft. But to become a true revolutionary one must first become one of the oppressed (not organize or educate or manipulate them, but become one of them) — or realize that you are one already. No woman wants that. Because that realization is humiliating, it hurts. It hurts to understand that at Woodstock or Altamont a woman would be declared uptight or a poor sport if she didn't want to be raped. It hurts to learn that the sisters still in male-Left captivity are putting down "the crazy feminists" to make themselves look unthreatening to our mutual oppressors. It hurts to be pawns in those games. It hurts to try and change each day of your life right now — not in talk, not "in your head," and not only conveniently "out there" in the Third World (half of which are women) or the black or brown communities (half of which are women) but in your own home, kitchen, bed. No getting away, no matter how else you are oppressed, from the primary oppression of being female in a patriarchal world. It hurts to hear that the sisters in the Gay Liberation Front, too, have to struggle continuously against the male chauvinism of their gay brothers. It hurts that Jane Alpert was cheered when rapping about imperialism, racism, the Third World, and All Those Safe Topics but hissed and booed by a movement crowd of men who wanted none of it when she began to talk about Women's liberation. The backlash is upon us.

They tell us the alternative is to hang in there and "struggle," to confront male domination in the counterleft, to fight beside or behind or beneath our brothers — to show 'em we're just as tough, just as revolushunerry, just as whatever-image-they-now-want-of-us-as-once-they-wanted-us-to-be-feminine-and-keep-up-the-home-fire-burning. . . . Sisters all, with only one real alternative: to seize our own power into our own hands, all women, separate and together, and make the Revolution the way it must be made — no priorities this time, no suffering group told to wait until after.

There is something every woman wears around her neck on a thin chain of fear — an amulet of madness. For each of us, there exists somewhere a moment of insult so intense that she will reach up and rip the amulet off, even if the chain tears the flesh of her neck. And the last protection from seeing the truth will be gone. Do you think, tugging furtively every day at the chain and going nicely insane as I am, that I can be concerned with the puerile squabbles of a counterfeit Left that laughs at my pain? Do you think such a concern is noticeable when set alongside the suffering of more than half the human species for the past 5,000 years — due to a whim of the other half? No, no, no, goodbye to all that.

Goodbye, goodbye forever, counterfeit Left, counterleft, male-dominated cracked-glass mirror reflection of the Amerikan Nightmare. Women are the real Left. We are rising, powerful in our unclean bodies; bright glowing mad in our inferior brains; wild hair flying, wild eyes staring, wild voices keening; undaunted by blood we who hemorrhage every twenty-eight days; laughing at our own beauty we who have lost our sense of humor; mourning for all each precious one of us might have been in this one living time-place had she not been born a woman; stuffing fingers into our mouths to stop the screams of fear and hate and pity for men we have loved and love still; tears in our eyes and bitterness in our mouths for children we couldn't have, or couldn't not have, or didn't want, or didn't want yet, or wanted and had in this place and this time of horror. We are rising with a fury older and potentially greater than any force in history, and this time we will be free or no one will survive. Power to all the people or to none. All the way down, this time.

[GodlessBiker]

1. So, what is a poor woman in a small town in Oklahoma to do?

[Athelwulf]

2. I don't have an answer yet. I'm still mulling.

I apologize.