Being humanitarian, being kind and loving, does not include entrusting my life or well-being to anyone whose intention or unconscious direction is to cause me harm. I am here to enjoy the life that Mother Earth gave me.
________
Ellen Jean Zoltak, “Have Gun, Will Travel” in Her Wits About Her: Self-Defense Success Stories by Women, edited by Denise Caignon and Gail Groves (1987, Harper & Row) p. 136.
“Could you kill someone to save yourself?” Therese said.
“Yes.”
“You sound very sure.”
“If you decide to hurt someone to save yourself, you need to commit to it completely.”
“Do or don’t do, there is no try,” Nina said in a Yoda voice.
“Something like that,” I said over the nervous laughter. “But about whether or not learning this is necessary, think of all the other things you learn that you’ll probably never need. Like fire drills. It’s unlikely that you’ll ever need to scramble from your workplace at three in the afternoon because of a massive fire, but you learn the procedure just in case.” But fires weren’t directed personally at their target, they didn’t sneer and call you bitch, and if you got burnt, your friends didn’t think it was your fault. Women weren’t reared from infancy to fear fire.
“So,” I said, “the knee, the eye, the throat. The knee is a good target, difficult to protect against one of those kicks we just learnt. The eye is extremely vulnerable.” Tonya made a pecking motion. “The throat is more complicated. There are two targets. The larynx, or voice box, which you can feel if you tilt your head up and run your finger down your windpipe until you feel a bump, your Adam’s apple…It’s easier to find on a man. If you hit that bump hard it will fracture and swell. The windpipe closes.”
“Sounds easy enough,” Pauletta said.
“It is.”
Easy did not mean fast or clean. Suffocation takes minutes, and when the victim clutches at his swelling throat it grates, like a knife point dragging along a brick wall.
“It sounds easy, but how many of you think you could do it?”
They looked at one another.
“You need to know you can do it. You need to know it will work. We ended last week with Christie saying that feminine means vulnerable. And that’s what we’re told, yes, but here’s a question. If an average man attacks a woman, intending to rape her, what do you think will happen if she struggles?”
“It’ll just make things worse,” Jennifer said. “He’ll get mad and hurt you worse.”
“No, not according to Justice Department statistics. Their latest available figures say that women fight off unarmed rapists successfully seventy-two percent of the time.”
They were quiet.
“But what if he has a knife?” Jennifer again.
“Then she’ll fight him off fifty-eight percent of the time.”
“A gun?”
“Fifty-one percent.”
“More than fifty percent, even with a gun?”
“Even with a gun. Government statistics.” The media wouldn’t say that, though, because fear is what sells papers and commercial spots. “And we’re talking about untrained, unarmed women. Even before you set foot in this class the odds were in your favor; if you fight back, you’ll probably win. Most stranger attackers, even serious ones who have planned their attack extensively, rely on the attack being fast and quiet. An attacker will watch you: read your body language. Depending on the situation they will test you, to see how easy you’ll be: they’ll spin some story about needing your help. They’ll flatter you, flirt with you. They imply that you’re being unreasonable or not nice or impolite or illogical. You have been brought up–programmed, if you like–to respond to these suggestions.”
“Those fuckers,” said Suze.
“You have been trained to seek approval, to please, to not draw attention to yourselves. It’s powerful training. Don’t underestimate it. I can teach you to snap spines with your bare feet, to break free of a stranglehold, to fracture a larynx with the side of your hand, but if you’re too worried about a stranger’s disapproval to even tell him you want to sit by yourself on a park bench, you won’t be able to use any of it…”
“People who lie expertly with their words give themselves away with their bodies. And your body knows that. It’s a language clearer than English. If words and actions conflict, believe the body…So next time you’re in a situation like that, ask yourself what you’d do if it was your daughter sitting there, or your frail, elderly mother. If you’d be willing to risk embarrassment for their sake, why not your own? And then ask yourself this: what’s the worst-case scenario if I act on my belief?”
“You’re totally wrong and end up feeling like a dork,” Christie said.
“Right. But then ask yourself: what’s the worst-case scenario if I don’t act on my belief?”
Silence, then “Huh,” said Pauletta.
I nodded. “Right. I end up dead.”
“You make it sound so easy,” Katherine said, “like it was a…a…”
“Cost-benefit analysis,” Tonya said.
“That’s what it is. When you go home tonight, get out your list and add another column: Feeling like a dork. Compare that to how it would feel to be dead, or be raped, or having both arms broken, or your cat tortured or your car stolen, and make some decisions.”
________
From Always by Nicola Griffith (2007, Penguin Group)
This was written about the lesbian/feminist “sex wars” of the late 1980s in the US, but astute readers will be able to identify these tactics being used all over the place.
Name-calling is a very old technique for discrediting someone else and, at the same time, taking on oneself the mantle of virtue…The fundamental issue is the inherent validity of one’s perceptions. As the hostilities have escalated, the sado-masochists and their allies have generously indulged in name-calling in order to assert the rightness of their perceptions and the wrongness of those of us who disagree with their claims. To describe one’s own perceptions of issues like sado-masochism, sex-change operations, or sex with children is, in this arena, quickly dismissed as “trashing” or, worse, “fascism.”
Forgotten in the accusations and rejoinders is this: The fact of sado-masochism, or Lesbian role-playing, or the sexual use of children doesn’t obligate Lesbians to support or condone the practices, nor does it enjoin us to be silent about our opinions. Yet, the sex “radicals” want to have it “their way,” and they will go to any rhetorical lengths to discredit anyone who challenges their pronouncements in order to make themselves seem to be the innocent victims of someone else’s meanness… The sado-masochists assume the inherent validity of their perceptions, as though their perceptions were immune to challenge. She who suggests that they might examine the sources of their perceptions/”gut feelings,” however gently, will quickly be labeled “anti-sex” and dismissed as a “vanilla vigilante.”
At the same time, the perceptions of Lesbians who don’t share these “gut feelings,” who refuse to accept the claim that sado-masochism is the “cutting edge” of radical Feminist political analysis, are verbally attacked and trivialized. Our perceptions, it seems, are open to question; theirs are not. Our perceptions are flawed, oppressive, and politically regressive; theirs are not. In the midst of the furor, other Lesbians observing the fray seem to accept the labels the sex “radicals” use as true. But my disapproval of sado-masochism and sex with children doesn’t make me “anti-sex”; anti-sado-masochism, yes–”anti-sex,” no….
Something is terribly wrong in this situation, and in the manner in which the “debate” is being carried on. The assumption that only some Lesbians’ perceptions are inherently true and accurate reflections of the world, and that other Lesbians are required to condone their “choice,” has served the sado-masochists and sex “radicals” well…The following quotation from a sado-masochist illustrates how belief in the first sentence becomes fact in the last, a sleight of syntax that enables the writer to cast the net of sado-masochism over all of us.
I believe that most, if not all, womyn have S/M fantasies and desires. All of us live in this miserable patriarchy, and I doubt that any of us have avoided internalizing and eroticizing the victim and victimizer. The question, then, and this needs to be openly discussed, is, how do we deal with the fact that dominance and submission are an important part of our erotic selves?
At first, the author sounds carefully personal: “I believe” and “I doubt.” But she then moves very quickly from “I doubt that any of us have avoided…eroticizing the victim and victimizer” to “…how do we deal with the fact that dominance and submission are an important part of our erotic selves?”
Those of us who don’t perceive pain as pleasure, who haven’t eroticized dominance and submission, are left no room here for our feelings and our perceptions. Furthermore, should any one of us dare to question their assertions or assert the validity of our perceptions, we are called Nazis, fascists, sex -police. We are called anti-sex, puritans and the vilelest lable they can think of, moralists… Such descriptions of Lesbians would be ridiculous if other Lesbians didn’t believe them. The disagreement, on the other hand, is not ridiculous. At stake are our perceptions and interpretations of the world. At stake is how we understand ourselves in the world. At stake is the possibility of creating a world in which pain cannot be eroticized, a world in which difference and dominance and submission cannot be eroticized. At stake is a vision of people as capable of living and loving differently from what we have learned in the sado-society.
Name-calling is easy. It requires absolutely no thought, no analysis, and no justification. Unlike a carefully thought-out analysis, it is also memorable. A one-word epithet, like racist or classist, can hide one’s utter lack of a cogent analysis…The language we use or allow to go unchallenged teaches us how to perceive each other, as though absolute truth inheres in the vilest names…
__________
From “Do We Mean What We Say? Horizontal Hostility and the World We Would Create” by Julia Penelope, from her book Call Me Lesbian: Lesbian Lives, Lesbian Theory (1992: Crossing Press).
Terrain Dandridge and Renata Hill have had their convictions overturned. From the Philadelphia Daily News:
NEW YORK - A New York state appeals court has reversed the gang-assault convictions of two of four New Jersey lesbians convicted of attacking a man who was stabbed after he made advances toward one of them.
The court vacated the conviction of 21-year-old Terrain Dandridge yesterday and dismissed the indictment against her. She was sentenced last year to 3 1/2 years in prison. She’s expected to be released within days.
The court also vacated the conviction of 26-year-old Renata Hill and sent it back for a new trial. Hill was sentenced to eight years. Her lawyer says she’s “delighted” by the ruling.
The appeals of the other two women are pending.
If you’re in the Bay Area, Terrain and her mother are scheduled to be at an event there on Tuesday with Angela Davis.
Read more at http://freenj4.wordpress.com.
Thanks Nicole.
Dominique Bressi, a founding member of Stop Porn Culture, is undertaking an awesome fundraising attempt. Please help her if you can.
What I am doing:
I will be racing in the 2008 Coeur D’Alene Ironman, a distinguished athletic event – one day, one race: swim, bike, run, 140.6 miles. I will be racing in an effort to raise money for Stop Porn Culture, a pioneering non-profit organization of which I am a cofounder. Stop Porn Culture is dedicated to challenging the pornography industry and an increasingly pornographic pop culture by working to end sexual exploitation, sexism, and sexist portrayals of women and girls in the media. Stop Porn Culture coordinates and presents social research grounded in feminist analyses of sexist, racist, and economic oppression. Stop Porn Culture affirms a sexuality rooted in equality, free of exploitation, coercion, and violence, and brings attention tothe loss of the sacred in real life everywhere. Stop Porn Culture insists that we face this assault with courage, that we see it, feel it, and live it in such a way that creates transformation.
What I am asking:
Please go to my fundraising page, organized through the Ironman Janus Charity Challenge, and donate what you can. My fundraising goal is $44,000 which will provide a salary for one half-time employee at Stop Porn Culture for two years. I am hoping to secure at least 100 individual sponsorships of $140 or $1 per mile, while seeking the balance in larger donations. I am grateful for any contribution made in this effort to stop the commodification of women and sexuality. Please forward this call to heart, generosity, and action to your community.
Who I am:
As a survivor…I will fight with my last breath to end the silence.
As a woman…I will reclaim this objectified body as a whole, present and intimate.
As a being…I will attest to the death of humanity: the loss of the sacred by the pornographic - corporate culture’s exploitive agenda.
As a psychologist…I will witness the horror suffered in the wake of institutionalized misogyny and bear the heartbreak therein.
As an activist…I will stand strong against sexual exploitation, enslavement, and dehumanization.
As I am…I will do this race as an act of defiance, a political act: a testament to the life I was never meant to survive.
With Gratitude,
Dominique Bressi
You can’t just get up in the morning and say to yourself, “Well, time to start saving the solar system!” Never mind the logic or illogic of it, never mind “modesty”; they’re not relevant. Even if you knew beyond all question that you had the power to do it, you couldn’t tackle the task that way and still function. You wouldn’t be able to tolerate even five minutes of leisure, you perceive…you’d be saying to yourself, How can you sit there and read (or take a bath, or talk to a friend, or anything else not indisputably critical to survival) when you could be saving the worlds? It would be like knowing that you were on the right track to finding a cure for a cruel disease, only worse. You’d work night and day. You’d work while you ate. And still, still, you would feel intolerable guilt.
That won’t do. The work will never get done, that way. You have to step outside what you’re doing, and look at it from outside, even while you are most deeply occupied with it. You have to learn to perceive it as a scientific project, as a theoretical investigation, as research for the sake of research. You have to rope it off in your mind as if it had nothing to do with anything, with maybe–maybe–a slim potential for practical application, far down a long and unforeseeable road.
_________
From Earthsong: Native Tongue III by Suzette Haden Elgin (DAW Books, 1994) pp.46-47.
Or are some people missing the point in a great big way?
Dictionaries generally agree that ’sexual’ means something on the order of pertaining to the genital union of a female and a male animal, and that “having sex” is having intercourse — intercourse being defined as the penetration of a vagina by a penis, with ejaculation. My own observation of usage leads me to think these accounts are inadequate and misleading. Some uses of these terms do fit this dictionary account. For instance, parents and counselors standardly remind young women that if they are going to be sexually active they must deal responsibly with the possibility of becoming pregnant. In this context, the word ’sexually’ is pretty clearly being used in a way that accords with the given definition. But many activities and events fall under the rubric ’sexual,’ apparently without semantic deviance, though they do not involve penile penetration of the vagina of a female human being. Penile penetration of almost anything, especially if it is accompanied by ejaculation, counts as having sex or being sexual. Moreover, events which cannot plausibly be seen as pertaining to penile erection, penetration and ejaculation will, in general, not be counted as sexual, and events that do not involve penile penetration or ejaculation will not be counted as having sex. For instance, if a girlchild is fondled and aroused by a man, and comes to orgasm, but the man refrains from penetration and ejaculation, the man can say, and speakers of English will generally agree, that he did not have sex with her. No matter what is going on, or (it must be mentioned) not going on, with respect to female arousal or orgasm, or in connection with the vagina, a pair can be said without semantic deviance to have had sex, or not to have had sex; the use of that term turns entirely on what was going on with respect to the penis.
When one first considers the dictionary definitions of ’sex’ and ’sexual,’ it seems that all sexuality is heterosexuality, by definition, and that the term ‘homosexual’ would be internally contradictory. There are uses of the term according to which this is exactly so. But in the usual and standard use, there is nothing semantically odd in describing two men as having sex with each other. According to that usage, any situation in which one or more penises are present is one in which something could happen which could be called having sex. But on this apparently “broader” definition there is nothing women could do in the absence of men that could, without sematic oddity, be called “having sex.” Speaking of women who have sex with other women is like speaking of ducks who engage in arm wrestling.
_____
From “To Be and Be Seen: The Politics of Reality” in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory by Marilyn Frye (Crossing Press, 1983), pp. 156-157.
For me, this started as such a clear idea: to reclaim lesbian identity. We, lesbians, will get to say who we are and who we are not. Politically, sexually, emotionally, within our communities. We will have space to discuss owning ourselves.
I’ve been wanting to do this issue for a year or two, in part to explore how we understand “lesbianism” in the present, in part to respond to attacks on lesbian identity. I believe the ideas that lesbians can sleep with men, that faggots can call themselves dykes and dykes can avail themselves of male privileges by calling themselves faggots, that men can be women and women who pass do it because they’re simply “playing with gender” — are meant to divide and destroy us, to drive us literally out of our own minds.
But I feel already driven out. Or more like I’m driving a car with no brakes down a side road in the mountains and it keeps picking up speed. I don’t know how to contain myself and make a nice, neat, clear argument. I have to finish ten books first, reread everything that came out in the last twenty years, find out exactly what deconstruction and essentialism mean. How am I going to do that, edit the magazine, go to work and have a life?
But I’ve got to try. I understand lesbians’ claim to own ourselves (well, it’s a stance more than a reality) as heroic. Our minds, our bodies, our labor, our sex, our heritages are constant staging grounds for war. Vastly out-powered on every front, we manage to survive and, for moments, thrive.
Owning ourselves is, after all, no small feat. That lesbians are different from “women” means something. Consider, for a minute, women’s bodies: women have been owned for centuries…
Other lesbians of course have written papers and books on the way these things work - I think of Marilyn Frye and Monique Wittig in particular. But the point is: a lesbian is in opposition to a “woman” by her very being. Of course we have to work on men’s terms to make a living, but even so we mostly rent our bodies out. A lesbian body is, theoretically, a body that no man owns.
Read the whole thing here.
________
From “Our bodies are the flags” by Elana Dykewomon, in Sinister Wisdom 49, The Lesbian Body, Spring/Summer 1993, pp. 4-9.
Two lesbians of color, Black and Asian, had seemingly forgotten lesbians are everywhere, and come from everywhere. We did gut checks on who we were thinking of when we thought of lesbians in East Oakland. We were thinking of dykes like the ones on 20/20: white, middle-class and definitely out of place in the inner city. We did find the Mexican restaurant, barely before 8, but they let us in and we ate while they closed up. While eating my taco, I watched the owners turn away customers who arrived after the hour.
Closing early, too dangerous to stay open past dusk.
I kept thinking about what I had said, what I had thought. I
felt ashamed. Who wanted me to think that the likes of me couldn’t be found in a neighborhood much like the Los Angeles city I had grown up in? It was that brutalizing and very alive force that declares only one race, class, only one type of person is okay, the rest of us are superfluous. Lesbians are everywhere I repeated again and again on our way back home. I felt close to tears. What does it mean that I call the “lesbian community” home, but do not see myself or other sisters like me living in that home? How many east Oakland dykes did I make invisible by my earlier statement? Was I thinking about the theft and violence that comes out of communities of poverty and imagining that lesbians are never thieves or never involved in violence? Was I remembering my own tough youth and how I knew that to be lesbian (or more accurately be caught lesbian) meant certain cruelty and attacks, even possibly murder? Maybe … maybe, but probably it was more like I was thinking that “lesbians” wouldn’t be in east Oakland, because they are safer, smarter, richer and whiter than residents of this area. Honestly and painfully I acknowledged to myself that I internally read lesbian as white lesbian.
Read the whole thing here.
_________
From “Internalizing the Lesbian of Color Body” by Jamie Lee Evans, from Sinister Wisdom 49, The Lesbian Body, Spring/Summer 1993, pp. 10-13.
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