about men and women, role-playing, and polarity, the
social situation of transsexuals will be transformed,
and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no
longer persecuted and despised. Three, community
built on androgynous identity will mean the end of
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transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will
be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon o f transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes o f sexual identity and behavior.
Transvestism
T h e first time I put on the black silk
panties I got a hardon right away.
Julian Beck
Transvestism is costuming which violates gender
imperatives. Transvestism is generally a sexually
charged act: the visible, public violation o f sex role is
erotic, exciting, dangerous. It is a kind o f erotic civil
disobedience, and that is precisely its value. Costuming
is part o f the strategy and process o f role destruction.
We see, for instance, that as women reject the female
role, they adopt “male” clothing. As sex roles dissolve,
the particular erotic content o f transvestism dissolves.
Bestiality
[In the Middle Ages] copulation with a
Jew was regarded as a form o f bestiality,
and incurred the same penances.
G. Rattray-Taylor, Sex in History
Primary bestiality (fucking between people and
other animals) is found in all nonindustrial societies.
Secondary bestiality (generalized erotic relationships
between people and other animals) is found everywhere
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on the planet, on every city street, in every rural town.
Bestiality is an erotic reality, one which clearly places
people in nature, not above it.
The relationship between people and other animals,
when nonpredatory, is always erotic since its substance
is nonverbal communication and touch. That eroticism
in its pure form is life-affirming and life-enriching was
sufficient reason to make bestiality a capital crime in
the Dark Ages, at least for the nonhuman animal; sufficient reason for the English in the Dark Ages to confuse sheep and Jews.
In contemporary society relationships between
people and other animals often reflect the sadomasochistic complexion o f human relationship. Animals in our culture are often badly abused, the objects of
violence and cruelty, the foil of repressed and therefore
very dangerous human sexuality. Some animals, like
horses and big dogs, become surrogate cocks, symbols
of ideal macho virility.
Needless to say, in androgynous community, human
and other-animal relationships would become more
explicitly erotic, and that eroticism would not degenerate into abuse. Animals would be part of the tribe and, with us, respected, loved, and free. They always
share our fate, whatever it is.
Incest
I was cold —later revolted a little, not
much — seemed perhaps a good idea to try
— know the Monster of the Beginning
Womb—Perhaps —that way. Would she
care? She needs a lover.
Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish
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189
T h e parent-child relationship is primarily erotic
because all human relationships are primarily erotic.
T h e incest taboo is a particularized form o f repression,
one which functions as the bulwark o f all the other repressions. T h e incest taboo ensures that however free we become, we never become genuinely free. T h e incest
taboo, because it denies us essential fulfillment with the
parents whom we love with our primary energy, forces
us to internalize those parents and constantly seek them,
or seek to negate them, in the minds, bodies, and hearts
o f other humans who are not our parents and never
will be.
T he incest taboo does the worst work o f the culture:
it teaches us the mechanisms o f repressing and internalizing erotic feeling—it forces us to develop those mechanisms in the first place; it forces us to particularize sexual feeling, so that it congeals into a need for a particular sexual “object” ; it demands that we
place the nuclear family above the human family. T h e
destruction o f the incest taboo is essential to the development o f cooperative human community based on the free-flow o f natural androgynous eroticism.
Th e Family
For if we grant that the sexual drive is at
birth diffuse and undifferentiated from the
total personality (Freud’s “ polymorphous
perversity”) and. . . becomes differentiated only in response to the incest taboo;
and that. . . the incest taboo is now necessary only in order to preserve the family;
then if we did away with the family we
would in effect be doing away with the
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repressions that mold sexuality into specific formations.
Shulamith Firestone,
The Dialectic o f Sex
The incest taboo can be destroyed only by destroying the nuclear family as the primary institution of the culture. The nuclear family is the school of values in a
sexist, sexually repressed society. One learns what one
must know: the roles, rituals, and behaviors appropriate
to male-female polarity and the internalized mechanisms of sexual repression. The alternative to the nuclear family at the moment is the extended family, or tribe. The growth of tribe is part of the process of
destroying particularized roles and fixed erotic identity.
As people develop fluid androgynous identity, they
will also develop the forms of community appropriate
to it. We cannot really imagine what those forms will
be.
Children
The special tie women have with children
is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature o f this bond is no
more than shared oppression. And that
moreover this oppression is intertwined
and mutually reinforcing in such complex
ways that we will be unable to speak of
the liberation o f women without also discussing the liberation o f children.
Shulamith Firestone,
The Dialectic o f Sex
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191
T w o developments are occurring simultaneously:
women are rejecting the female role, and life is being
created in the laboratory. Unless the structure is totally
transformed, we can expect that when women no longer
function as biological breeders we will be expendable.
As men learn more and more to control reproduction,
as cloning becomes a reality, and as the technology o f
computers and robots develop, there is every reason
to think that men as we know them will use that control and technology to create the sex objects that will gratify them. Men, after all, nave throughout history
resorted to gynocide as a stratagem o f social control,
as a tactical way o f attaining/maintaining power. That
is the simple, compelling reality. T here are only two
othe
r options: women must seize power, or we must
accomplish the transformation into androgyny.
T h e freedom o f those who are capable o f biological
reproduction from that work (which is simply a form
o f physical labor) is entirely congruent with androgynous community. Only in the concentration-camp world o f polarity must one expect that development to lead to
gynocide. T h e social processes here stand naked: if
women must seize power in order to survive, and somehow manage to do that, power will most probably shift without being transformed; if we can create androgynous community, we can abandon power altogether as a social reality —that is the final, and most important,
implication o f androgyny.
As for children, they too are erotic beings, closer
to androgyny than the adults who oppress them. Children are fully capable o f participating in community, and have every right to live out their own erotic im
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pulses. In androgynous community, those impulses
would retain a high degree of nonspecificity and would
no doubt show the rest of us the way into sexual self-
realization. The distinctions between “children” and
“adults, ” and the social institutions which enforce those
distinctions, would disappear as androgynous community develops.
Conclusion
Nothing short of everything will really do.
Aldous Huxley, Island
The object is cultural transformation. The object is
the development of a new kind of human being and a
new kind of human community. All of us who have ever
tried to right a wrong recognize that truly nothing short
of everything will really do.
The way from here to there will not be easy. We
must make a total commitment —no longer to take
refuge in the scenarios of man-woman violence which
are society’s regulators, no longer to play the male-
female roles we have been taught, no longer to refuse
to know who we are and what we desire so that we need
not take responsibility for our own lives. We must
refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist —marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil. We must refuse to
submit to the fears engendered by sexual taboos. We
must refuse to submit to all forms of behavior and relationship which reinforce male-female polarity, which nourish basic patterns of male dominance and female
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193
submission. We must instead build communities where
violence is not the main dynamic o f human relationship,
where natural desire is the fundament o f community,
where androgyny is the operative premise, where tribe
based on androgyny and the social forms which would
develop from it are the bases o f the collective cultural
structure —noncoercive, nonsexist. As Julian Beck
wrote, the journey to love is not romantic. As many have
written, the journey to freedom is not romantic either —
nor is the way known precisely and for all time. We
begin here and now, inch by inch.
You do not teach someone to count only
up to eight. You do not say nine and ten
and beyond do not exist. You give people
everything or they are not able to count at
all. There is a real revolution or none at
all.
Pericles Korovessis, in an interview
in Liberation, June 1973
The Revolution is not an event that takes
two or three days, in which there is shooting and hanging. It is a long drawn out
process in which new people are created,
capable of renovating society so that the
revolution does not replace one elite with
another, but so that the revolution creates
a new anti-authoritarian structure with
anti-authoritarian people who in their
turn re-organize the society so that it becomes a non-alienated human society, free
from war, hunger, and exploitation.
Rudi Dutschke, March 7, 1968
There is a misery of the body and a misery
of the mind, and if the stars, whenever we
looked at them, poured nectar into our
mouths, and the grass became bread, we
would still be sad. We live in a system that
manufactures sorrow, spilling it out of its
mill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm,
and we drown down, dead, too soon.
. . . uprising is the reversal of the system, and revolution is the turning of tides.
Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre
AFT ERWORD
The Great Punctuation Typography Struggle
this text has been altered in one very serious way. I
wanted it to be printed the way it was written —lower
case letters, no apostrophes, contractions.
I like my text to be as empty as possible, only necessary punctuation is necessary, when one knows ones purposes one knows what is necessary.
my publisher, in his corporate wisdom, filled the
pages with garbage: standard punctuation, he knew his
purposes; he knew what was necessary, our purposes
differed: mine, to achieve clarity; his, to sell books.
my publisher changed my punctuation because book
reviewers (Mammon) do not like lower case letters,
fuck (in the old sense) book reviewers (Mammon).
W hen I say god and mammon concerning the
writer writing, I mean that any one can use words to
say something. And in using these words to say what
he has to say he may use those words directly or in-
directly. I f he uses these words indirectly he says what
he intends to have heard by somebody who is to hear
and in so doing inevitably he has to serve mammon.. . .
Now serving god for a writer who is writing is writing
anything directly, it makes no difference what it is but
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Woman Hating
it must be direct, the relation between the thing done
and the doer must be direct. In this way there is completion and the essence o f the completed thing is completion.
Gertrude Stein
in a letter to me, Grace Paley wrote, “once everyone
tells the truth artists will be unnecessary —meanwhile
there’s work for us. ”
telling the truth, we know what it is when we do it
and when we learn not to do it we forget what it is.
form, shape, structure, spatial relation, how the
printed word appears on the page, where to breathe,
where to rest, punctuation is marking time, indicating
rhythms, even in my original text I used too much of it
— I overorchestrated. I forced you to breathe where I
do, instead of letting you discover your own natural
breath.
I begin by presuming that I am free.
I begin with nothing, no form, no content, and I ask:
what do I want to do and how do I want to do it.
I begin by presuming that what I write belongs to
me.
I begin by presuming that I determine the form I
use —in all its particulars. I work at my craft —in all
its particulars.
in fact, everything is already determined,
in fact, all the particula
rs have been determined and
are enforced.
in fact, where I violate what has already been determined I will be stopped.
in fact, the enforcers will enforce.
Afterword
199
“Whatever he may seem to us, he is yet a servant of the
Law; that is, he belongs to the Law and as such is set
beyond human judgment. In that case one dare not
believe that the doorkeeper is subordinate to the man.
Bound as he is by his service, even at the door of the
Law, he is incomparably freer than anyone at large in
the world. The man is only seeking the Law, the doorkeeper is already attached to it. It is the Law that has placed him at his post; to doubt his integrity is to doubt
the Law itself. ”
“I don't agree with that point of view, ” said K.,
shaking his head, “for if one accepts it, one must accept
as true everything the doorkeeper says. But you yourself have sufficiently proved how impossible it is to do that. ”
“No, ” said the priest, “it is not necessary to accept
everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary. ”
“A melancholy conclusion, ” said K. “It turns lying
into a universal principle. ”
Franz Kafka
I presume that I am free. I act. the enforcers enforce. I discover that I am not free, then: either I lie (it is necessary to lie) or I struggle (if I do not lie, I
must struggle), if I struggle, I ask, why am I not free
and what can I do to become free? I wrote this book to
find out why I am not free and what I can do to become
free.
Though the social structure begins by framing the
noblest laws and the loftiest ordinances that “the great
of the earth” have devised, in the end it comes to this:
breach that lofty law and they take you to a prison cell
and shut your human body off from human warmth.
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Ultimately the law is enforced by the unfeeling guard
punching his fellow man hard in the belly.
Judith Malina
without the presum ption o f freedom , there is no
freedom . I am free, how, then, do I want to live my
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