The Female Eunuch (43 page)
The first direct attack on the 1967 Manifesto came from an anonym- ous male who wrote to
New Left Notes
in December. He suggested that there was danger in placing an underdeveloped woman in a position of leadership because she would surely fail and so her sense
of inferiority would be intensified;
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moreover, he argued women could not separate themselves from men because they needed them, and their role is to be humbler, more accepting and compassionate than men. He thought that women ought first to educate themselves to make valid challenge for leadership of the movement, and that perhaps they ought to keep their maiden names when they married. Docile SDS women began to murmur and by the next SDS National Convention the murmur had grown to a growl. In
New Left Notes
for 10 June 1968 Marilyn Webb wrote a sharp description of the lot of women members of SDS, the accuracy of which stung every rad- ical girl into new resentment, although she did not advocate secession from the male-dominated movement, but as usual extra work in at- taining liberation in the spare time that was not taken up by typing,
distributing leaflets, being beaten by the police and keeping house and bed for a revolutionary male.
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At the 1968 convention women
misbehaved and drew the wrath of the men upon themselves. They began to realize that they were not to be liberated fighting other people’s battles. The men used the conventional arguments against dominating women and the women, realizing the insidiousness of the polarity, decided that some hard thinking had to be undertaken and some completely new strategy devised.
Two older members of the radical university movement were preparing a first statement towards such a strategy at this time. Their newssheet,
Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement
, was begun and their manifesto,
Towards a Women’s Liberation Movement
, heralded its arrival. The arrest of Carol Thomas for the second time and her incarceration for a long sentence added poignancy and urgency to the case.
First they attacked the women’s manifesto, pointing out the defects of its wishy-washy liberal reformism by comparing it with the argu- ments of city councils about the treatment of the blacks. By analogy with the development of Black Power as the first significant attack on
the pattern of paternalistic legislation, they argued for a kind of Woman Power movement in which the first prerogative was to de- velop power, self-confidence and an authentic female strategy. Beverly Jones pointed out that the women students who were members of the SDS were privileged women who had not yet formed any clear idea of the disabilities which increasingly encumber women as they move on their divinely sanctioned path towards
kinder
and
küche
. She stressed the need to fight their own battles in order to find out what the problems really were, on the SDS pattern ‘Con- frontation is political awareness’. Women who were successful in the male-dominated movement had become so by manipulating their special position and pandering to male values, and as such were no more entitled to speak for their sisters than black business- men are to represent Harlem; nevertheless, even for them, as yet unmarried and relatively energetic, their dependence upon men for any ego or prestige already made their lives a travesty and a night- mare which they had not the wit or pride to reject. As a married woman she drew a horrific picture of what they ought to expect, and drew up a nine-point policy which has since become more or less basic in the young women’s liberation groups.
Women must resist pressure to enter into movement activities other than their own. There cannot be restructuring of this so- ciety until the relationships between the sexes are restructured. The inequalitarian relationships in the home are perhaps the basis of all evil. Men can commit any horror, or cowardly suffer any mutilation of their souls and retire to the home to be treated there with awe, respect, and perhaps love. Men will never face their true identity or their real problems under these circum- stances, nor will we…
Since women in great measure are ruled by the fear of physical force, they must learn to protect themselves…
We must force the media to a position of realism…
Women must share their experiences with each other until they understand, identify, and explicitly state the many psychologic- al techniques of domination in and out of the
home. These should be published and distributed widely until they are common knowledge. No woman should feel befuddled and helpless in an argument with her husband…
Somebody has got to start designing communities in which women can be freed from their burdens long enough for them to experience humanity…
Women must learn their own history because they have a his- tory to be proud of and a history which will give pride to their daughters…. Courageous women brought us out of total bondage to our present improved position. We must not forsake them but learn from them and allow them to join the cause once more. The market is ripe for feminist literature, historic and otherwise. We must provide it.
Women who have any scientific competency at all ought to begin investigating the real temperamental and cognitive dif- ferences between the sexes…
Equal pay for equal work has been a project poo-pooed by the radicals but it should not be because it is an instrument of bondage…
In what is hardly an exhaustive list I must mention abortion laws.
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It would be too easy to cavil at the ignorance of point 7 (research into sex differences has been going on for fifty years) or at point 8 for its syntactic incoherence. Point 2, learning to protect oneself, is not such a difficult matter, for weapons are easy enough to acquire and karate lessons are included in the syllabus of debutantes’ finish- ing schools: the difficulty is to render physical violence irrelevant, which is the only hope of any human being, but none of the feminist groups has so far emerged with a strategy. Part II of
Towards a Wo- men’s Liberation Movement
was written by Judith Brown, research assistant in psychiatry at the University of Florida. She too described the position of radical middle-class women in SDS, and developed the idea of marriage being to women what integration was to the blacks, using the nigger/female analogy that has become so popular, and so misleading, in discussions of the female question. She sugges- ted all-female communes for radical women, but did not see that an all-female commune is in no way different from the medieval con- vents
where women who revolted against their social and biological roles could find intellectual and moral fulfilment, from which they exerted no pressure on the status quo at all. Her consideration of celibacy as a tactic made the conventual aspect of her strategy even more apparent. Lesbianism and masturbation as alternatives to integration do not weaken the force of the convent parallel significantly. The manifesto ends with an unsigned incoherent lament for the second arrest of Carol Thomas and her incarceration for a considerable period. The point is not made that she was specifically victimized as a woman, indeed the charge on which she was arrested is not named, but as a demonstration of solidarity between revolutionary women perhaps it has some value.
We have not conned ourselves into political paralysis as an excuse for inaction—we are a subjugated caste. We need to develop a female movement, most importantly, because we must fight this social order, with all of the faculties we have got, and those in full gear. And we must be liberated so that we can turn from our separate domestic desperation—our own Apocalypse of the Damned—toward an ex- ercise of social rage against each dying of the light. We must get our stuff together, begin to dismantle this system’s deadly social and military toys, and stop the mad dogs who rule us every place we’re
at.
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The female quest for self-knowledge suddenly discovered a whole new arsenal, the work of Masters and Johnson, published in 1966 with the title
Human Sexual Response
. The implications for female liberation were first savagely outlined by Mette Eiljerson and then read in the original Danish by a Feminist, Anne Koedt. The argument of Miss Koedt’s
The Myth of Vaginal Orgasm
, that orgasmic potency became through the anatomical ignorance of Freud and Reich an unattainable goal for woman and a cause of greater shame and inau- thenticity in sexual behaviour, is indubitably correct, but her corol- laries, that the mistake was the deliberate result of male chauvinism, that the vagina is irrelevant to female
sexual pleasure, that men insist on penetration because the vagina is the pleasantest place for a penis to be (a touch of female chauvin- ism here!), are at best doubtful. ‘Men fear that they will become sexually expendable if the clitoral orgasm is substituted for the va-
ginal as the basic pleasure for women…’
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One wonders just whom Miss Koedt has gone to bed with. Most men are aware of the clitoris and are really frightened of being de- sired simply as a sexual object. The man who is expected to have a rigid penis at all times is not any freer than the woman whose vagina is supposed to explode with the first thrust of such a penis. Men are as brainwashed as women into supposing that their sexual organs are capable of anatomical impossibilities. Miss Koedt’s assumptions show that she has seen through her own brainwashing but not through theirs. Her last point is most peculiar.
Lesbianism
—Aside from the strictly anatomical reasons why women might seek women lovers, there is a great fear on men’s part that women will seek the company of other women on a full, human basis. The establishment of clitoral orgasm as fact would threaten the heterosexual
institution
. The oppressor always fears the unity of the oppressed, and the escape of women from the psychological hold men now maintain. Rather than imagining a future free rela- tionship between individuals, men tend to react with paranoid fears
of revenge on the part of women (as witnessed with the V. Solanas events).
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One wonders who shot whom according to Miss Koedt’s version! In most cases male unity is preserved at the expense of outlawing any sexual contact between male members of the group. Sex is simply not a cohesive force. Homosexual groups within society as we know it are not noted for their cohesiveness or cooperation, although that is not itself a refutation of homosexuality in a different situation where guilt and dishonesty were not inescapable concomitants. The most subtle of the assumptions behind such a paper is that the status quo, which in this case is the vaginal sensitivity of middle-class American lovers in the 1960s, is the only possible
situation: in developing her theory Anne Koedt condemns all women to that condition. Until the experiments are carried out in Tahiti and other outlandish places (if they still exist) we will not know what level of insensitivity is anatomically determined. At all events a clitoral orgasm with a full cunt is nicer than a clitoral orgasm with an empty one, as far as I can tell at least. Besides, a man is more than a dildo. Nancy Mann wrote a corrective to Miss Koedt’s article, which is now issued with it by the
New England Free Press
. She at- tempts a new explanation of female failure to achieve orgasm, mostly on the grounds that we are not doing it right, that we are not turned on to the essential nature of the experience. Her conclusion is a hopeful one of women who really don’t want to masturbate or learn tribadism.
I’m sure it’s no coincidence that so many people in this country have bad sex. It goes along with the general disregard for human pleasures in favour of the logic of making profit. Obviously people have real control over and responsibility for their actions in sex. But for women to blame it all on to men (or men to blame it all on women) is bad politics…Sex, work, love, morality, the sense of community—the things that have the greatest potential for being satisfying to us are undermined and exploited by our social organization. That’s what we’ve got to fight.
If you can’t get along with your lover you can get out of bed. But what do you do when your country’s fucking you over?
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The obvious softening of Anne Koedt’s grim satisfaction at ousting the penis does not protect Nancy Mann from the snide bitchery of female columnists; in her sneering article in
New York
, Julie Baumgold
managed to imply that Miss Mann’s surname, as good a Jewish name as her own, was evidence of female chauvinism and penis envy.
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In fact, despite the generally derisive attitude of the press, female liberation movements have so far been very much a phenomenon of the media. The gargantuan appetite of the newspapers for novelty has led to the anomaly of women’s liberation stories appearing alongside the advertisement for emulsified fats to
grease the skin, scented douches to render the vagina more agreeable, and all the rest of the marketing for and by the feminine stereotype. Female liberation movements are good for news stories because of their atmosphere of perversion, female depravity, sensation and solemn absurdity.
The summer of 1968 was not only momentous for the women’s movement because women emerged as a coherent group in the New Left but also because Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol. Suddenly SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, was big news, battling with Bobby Kennedy’s assassination for the front page. There is, apart from Miss Solanas herself, little evidence that SCUM ever functioned. She was too easily characterized as a neurotic, perverted exhibitionist, and the incident was too much a part of Warhol’s three-ring circus of exploited nuts for her message to come across unperverted. But people read her book for thrills, and got more than they bargained for. More than any of the female students she had seized upon the problem of the polarity, of the gulf which divides men and women from humanity and places them in a limbo of opposite sides. She advanced the most shocking strategy for allowing women to move back to humanity—simply, that they exterminate men. It was prob- ably the fierce energy and lyricism of her uncompromising statement of men’s fixation on the feminine, and their desperate battle to live up to their own penile fixation, which radicalized Ti-Grace Atkinson out of NOW, and even gingered up those ladies’ slogans until they managed to purify their ranks of such brutality, and eventually gave birth to WITCH, Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. WITCH is essentially an experiment with the media. Public bra-burning, hexing the Chase Manhattan Bank, and invading the annual Bride Fair at Madison Square Garden dressed as witches and bearing broom-sticks were all bally-hoo operations, and, given the susceptibility of the commercial system to its own methods, they worked, to the point of causing the Wall Street