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At the National Women’s Conference (Houston, Texas, November 1977), I spoke with many women on the Right. The conversations were ludicrous, terrifying, bizarre, instructive, and, as other feminists have reported, sometimes strangely moving.
Right-wing women fear lesbians. A liberal black delegate from Texas told me that local white women had tried to convince her that lesbians at the conference would assault her, call her dirty names, and were personally filthy. She told me that she would vote against the sexual-preference resolution* because otherwise she would not be able to return home. But she also said that she would tell the white women that the lesbians had been polite and clean. She said that she knew it was wrong to deprive anyone of a job and had had no idea before coming to Houston that lesbian mothers lost their children. This, she felt, was genuinely terrible. I asked her if she thought a time would come when she would have to stand up for lesbian rights in her hometown. She nodded yes gravely, then explained with careful, evocative emphasis that the next-closest town to where she lived was 160 miles away. The history of blacks in the South was palpable.
Right-wing women consistently spoke to me about lesbians as if lesbians were rapists, certified committers of sexual assault against women and girls. No facts could intrude on this psycho-sexual fantasy. No facts or figures on male sexual violence against women and children could change the focus of their fear. They admitted that they knew of many cases of male assault against females, including within families, and did not know of any assaults by lesbians against females. The men, they acknowledged when pressed, were sinners, and they hated sin, but there was clearly something comforting in the normalcy of heterosexual rape. To them, the lesbian was inherently monstrous, experienced almost as a demonic sexual force hovering closer and closer. She was the dangerous intruder, encroaching, threatening by her very presence a sexual order that cannot bear scrutiny or withstand challenge.
Right-wing women regard abortion as the callous murder of infants. Female selflessness expresses itself in the conviction that a fertilized egg surpasses an adult female in the authenticity of its existence. The grief of these women for fetuses is real, and their contempt for women who become pregnant out of wedlock is awesome to behold. The fact that most illegal abortions in the bad old days were performed on married women with children, and that thousands of those women died each year, is utterly meaningless to them. They see abortion as a criminal act committed by godless whores, women absolutely unlike themselves.
Right-wing women argue that passage of the Equal Rights Amendment will legalize abortion irrevocably. No matter how often I heard this argument (and I heard it constantly), I simply could not understand it. Fool that I was, I had thought that the Equal Rights Amendment was abhorrent because of toilets. Since toilets figured prominently in the resistance to civil rights legislation that would protect blacks, the argument that centered on toilets—while irrational—was as Amerikan as apple pie. No one mentioned toilets. I brought them up, but no one cared to discuss them. The passionate, repeated cause-and-effect arguments linking the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion presented a new mystery. I resigned myself to hopeless confusion. Happily, after the conference, I read The Power of the Positive Woman, in which Schlafly explains: “Since the mandate of ERA is for sex equality, abortion is essential to relieve women of their unequal burden of being forced to bear an unwanted baby.”19 Forcing women to bear unwanted babies is crucial to the social program of women who have been forced to bear unwanted babies and who cannot bear the grief and bitterness of such a recognition. The Equal Rights Amendment has now become the symbol of this devastating recognition. This largely accounts for the new wave of intransigent opposition to it.
Right-wing women, as represented in Houston, especially from the South, white and black, also do not like Jews. They live in a Christian country. A fragile but growing coalition between white and black women in the New South is based on a shared Christian fundamentalism, which translates into a shared anti-Semitism. The stubborn refusal of Jews to embrace Christ and the barely masked fundamentalist perception of Jews as Christ killers, communists and usurers both, queers, and, worst of all, urban intellectuals, mark Jews as foreign, sinister, and an obvious source of the many satanic conspiracies sweeping the nation.
The most insidious expression of this rife anti-Semitism was conveyed by a fixed stare, a self-conscious smile and the delightful words “Ah just love tha Jewish people.” The slime variety of anti-Semite, very much in evidence, was typified by a Right to Life leader who called doctors who perform abortions “Jewish baby killers.” I was asked a hundred times: “Am Ah speakin with a Jewish girl?” Despite my clear presence as a lesbian-feminist with press credentials plastered all over me from the notorious Ms. magazine, it was as a Jew that I was consistently challenged and, on several occasions, implicitly threatened. Conversation after conversation stopped abruptly when I answered that yes, I was a Jew.
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The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women. The quality of this fear and the pervasiveness of this ignorance are consequences of male sexual domination over women. Every accommodation that women make to this domination, however apparently stupid, self-defeating, or dangerous, is rooted in the urgent need to survive somehow on male terms. Inevitably this causes women to take the rage and contempt they feel for the men who actually abuse them, those close to them, and project it onto others, those far away, foreign, or different. Some women do this by becoming right-wing patriots, nationalists determined to triumph over populations thousands of miles removed. Some women become ardent racists, anti-Semites, or homophobes. Some women develop a hatred of loose or destitute women, pregnant teenage girls, all persons unemployed or on welfare. Some hate individuals who violate social conventions, no matter how superficial the violations. Some become antagonistic to ethnic groups other than their own or to religious groups other than their own, or they develop a hatred of those political convictions that contradict their own. Women cling to irrational hatreds, focused particularly on the unfamiliar, so that they will not murder their fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, lovers, the men with whom they are intimate, those who do hurt them and cause them grief. Fear of a greater evil and a need to be protected from it intensify the loyalty of women to men who are, even when dangerous, at least known quantities. Because women so displace their rage, they are easily controlled and manipulated haters. Having good reason to hate, but not the courage to rebel, women require symbols of danger that justify their fear. The Right provides these symbols of danger by designating clearly defined groups of outsiders as sources of danger. The identities of the dangerous outsiders can change over time to meet changing social circumstances—for example, racism can be encouraged or contained; anti-Semitism can be provoked or kept dormant; homophobia can be aggravated or kept under the surface—but the existence of the dangerous outsider always functions for women simultaneously as deception, diversion, pain-killer, and threat.
The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide. The danger is that self-sacrificing women are perfect foot soldiers who obey orders, no matter how criminal those orders are. The hope is that these women, upset by internal conflicts that cannot be stilled by manipulation, challenged by the clarifying drama of public confrontation and dialogue, will be forced to articulate the realities of their own experiences as women subject to the will of men. In doing so, the anger that necessarily arises from a true perception of how they have been debased may move them beyond the fear that transfixes them to a meaningful rebellion against the men who in fact diminish, despise, and terrorize them. This is the common struggle of all women, whatever their male-defined ideological origins; and this struggle alone has the power to transform women who are enemies against one another into allies fighting for individual and collective survival that is not based o
n self-loathing, fear, and humiliation, but instead on self-determination, dignity, and authentic integrity.
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* This analysis of Bryant’s situation was written in 1978 and published in Ms. in June 1979. In May 1980, Bryant filed for divorce. In a statement issued separately from the divorce petition, she contended that Green had “violated my most precious asset—my conscience” (The New York Times, May 24, 1980). Within three weeks after the divorce decree (August 1980), the state citrus agency of Florida, which Bryant had represented for eleven years, decided she was no longer a suitable representative because of her divorce: “The contract had to expire, because of the divorce and so forth,” one agency executive said (The New York Times, September 2, 1980). Feminist lawyer and former National Organization for Women president Karen DeCrow urged Bryant to bring suit under the 1977 Florida Human Rights Act, which prohibits job discrimination on the basis of marital status. Even before DeCrow’s sisterly act, however, Bryant had reevaluated her position on the women’s movement, to which, under Green’s tutelage, she had been bitterly opposed. “What has happened to me,” Bryant told the National Enquirer in June 1980, “makes me understand why there are angry women who want to pass ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]. That still is not the answer. But the church doesn’t deal with the problems of women as it should. There’s been some really bad teachings, and I think that’s why I’m really concerned for my own children—particularly the girls. You have to recognize that there has been discrimination against women, that women have not had the teaching of the fullness and uniqueness of their abilities.” Pace, sister.
* According to many newspaper reports, Phyllis Schlafly wanted Reagan to appoint her to a position in the Pentagon. This he did not do. In a debate with Schlafly (Stanford University, January 26, 1982) lawyer Catharine A. MacKinnon tried to make Schlafly understand that she had been discriminated against as a woman: “Mrs. Schlafly tells us that being a woman has not gotten in her way. I propose that any man who had a law degree and graduate work in political science; had given testimony on a wide range of important subjects for decades; had done effective and brilliant political, policy and organizational work within the party [the Republican Party]; had published widely, including nine books; and stopped a major social initiative to amend the constitution just short of victory dead in its tracks [the Equal Rights Amendment]; and had a beautiful accomplished family—any man like that would have a place in the current administration…. I would accept correction if this is wrong; and she may yet be appointed. She was widely reported to have wanted such a post, but I don’t believe everything I read, especially about women. I do think she should have wanted one and they should have found her a place she wanted. She certainly deserved a place in the Defense Department. Phyllis Schlafly is a qualified woman.” Answered Schlafly: “This has been an interesting debate. More interesting than I thought it was going to be…. I think my opponent did have one good point—[audience laughter] Well, she had a couple of good points…. She did have a good point about the Reagan administration, but it is the Reagan administration’s loss that they didn’t ask me to [drowned out by audience applause] but it isn’t my loss.”
* “Congress, State, and local legislatures should enact legislation to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sexual and affectional preference in areas including, but not limited to, employment, housing, public accommodations, credit, public facilities, government funding, and the military.
“State legislatures should reform their penal codes or repeal State laws that restrict private sexual behavior between consenting adults.
“State legislatures should enact legislation that would prohibit consideration of sexual or affectional orientation as a factor in any judicial determination of child custody or visitation rights. Rather, child custody cases should be evaluated solely on the merits of which party is the better parent, without regard to that person’s sexual and affectional orientation.”
LETTERS FROM A WAR ZONE
1988
I WANT A TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR TRUCE DURING WHICH THERE IS NO RAPE
1983
This was a speech given at the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men in the fall of 1983 in St Paul, Minnesota. One of the organizers kindly sent me a tape and a transcript of my speech. The magazine of the men’s movement, M., published it. I was teaching in Minneapolis. This was before Catharine MacKinnon and I had proposed or developed the civil rights approach to pornography as a legislative strategy. Lots of people were in the audience who later became key players in the fight for the civil rights bill. I didn’t know them then. It was an audience of about 500 men, with scattered women. I spoke from notes and was actually on my way to Idaho—an eight-hour trip each way (because of bad air connections) to give a one-hour speech on Art—fly out Saturday, come back Sunday, can’t talk more than one hour or you’ll miss the only plane leaving that day, you have to run from the podium to the car for the two-hour drive to the plane. Why would a militant feminist under this kind of pressure stop off on her way to the airport to say hi to 500 men? In a sense, this was a feminist dream-come-true. What would you say to 500 men if you could? This is what I said, how I used my chance. The men reacted with considerable love and support and also with considerable anger. Both. I hurried out to get my plane, the first hurdle for getting to Idaho. Only one man in the 500 threatened me physically. He was stopped by a woman bodyguard (and friend) who had accompanied me.
I have thought a great deal about how a feminist, like myself, addresses an audience primarily of political men who say that they are antisexist. And I thought a lot about whether there should be a qualitative difference in the kind of speech I address to you. And then I found myself incapable of pretending that I really believe that that qualitative difference exists. I have watched the men’s movement for many years. I am close with some of the people who participate in it. I can’t come here as a friend even though I might very much want to. What I would like to do is to scream: and in that scream I would have the screams of the raped, and the sobs of the battered; and even worse, in the center of that scream I would have the deafening sound of women’s silence, that silence into which we are born because we are women and in which most of us die.
And if there would be a plea or a question or a human address in that scream, it would be this: why are you so slow? Why are you so slow to understand the simplest things; not the complicated ideological things. You understand those. The simple things. The clichés. Simply that women are human to precisely the degree and quality that you are.
And also: that we do not have time. We women. We don’t have forever. Some of us don’t have another week or another day to take time for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those streets and do something. We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, “Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way.” That’s true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.
And it is happening for a simple reason. There is nothing complex and difficult about the reason. Men are doing it, because of the kind of power that men have over women. That power is real, concrete, exercised from one body to another body, exercised by someone who feels he has a right to exercise it, exercised in public and exercised in private. It is the sum and substance of women’s oppression.
It is not done 5000 miles away or 3000 miles away. It is done here and it is done now and it is done by the p
eople in this room as well as by other contemporaries: our friends, our neighbors, people that we know. Women don’t have to go to school to learn about power. We just have to be women, walking down the street or trying to get the housework done after having given one’s body in marriage and then having no rights over it.
The power exercised by men day to day in life is power that is institutionalized. It is protected by law. It is protected by religion and religious practice. It is protected by universities, which are strongholds of male supremacy. It is protected by a police force. It is protected by those whom Shelley called “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”: the poets, the artists. Against that power, we have silence.
It is an extraordinary thing to try to understand and confront why it is that men believe—and men do believe—that they have the right to rape. Men may not believe it when asked. Everybody raise your hand who believes you have the right to rape. Not too many hands will go up. It’s in life that men believe they have the right to force sex, which they don’t call rape. And it is an extraordinary thing to try to understand that men really believe that they have the right to hit and to hurt. And it is an equally extraordinary thing to try to understand that men really believe that they have the right to buy a woman’s body for the purpose of having sex: that that is a right. And it is very amazing to try to understand that men believe that the seven-billion-dollar-a-year industry that provides men with cunts is something that men have a right to.
Last Days at Hot Slit Page 16
