April 10th, 2006
I’m sick of heterosexism too
So you already know I’m sick of sexual assault. I created those antirape designs and it was good, satisfying work, but even as I was doing it I was aware that underneath all the messages I could think of, there’s still the assumption that men care. That they care that they’re hurting us, or would if they only knew. That they care if we consent. And then I read Pinko Feminist Hellcat’s posts on the OC rape case, or I read some of the graphic stories of sexual abuse on Femivist’s Survivors’ Voices, and I realize, there’s a whole segment of the male population out there that doesn’t give a shit. When a 30-year-old man forces his penis into the mouth of a child, it’s not date rape, it’s not some necking that got out of hand. He’s not thinking she’s consenting; he doesn’t care. When three college students viciously beat and rape a woman in a houseful of people, it wasn’t because she didn’t say “no” loudly enough. When three 18-year-olds purposely drug the drink of a 16-year-old woman and violate her in every way possible with penises and objects while she’s passed out, and make a video of it, it’s not a misunderstanding. She’s an object to them, a thing to be used, and the damage to her doesn’t even matter because there will be more where she came from.
And I get to thinking how feminists have been telling these stories for more than 30 years now.* For more than 30 years we’ve been detailing the abuse that men have heaped upon us, in every fashion they’ve been able to imagine. We’ve been analyzing power structures and locating oppressions and decontextualizing sexualities, and you know what? The stories aren’t changing. For the most part, these bloggers are women of my generation, women in our 30s or younger, and we’re still being dumped on and sat on and shat on by men. None of this is women’s fault, but it seems to me we’ve managed to identify damn few alternatives. Men ought to change, clearly. Their behavior is inhumane and inhuman and unjust and unacceptable. Rape, battering, war, capitalist exploitation—they should stop doing all of this immediately.
But it doesn’t seem to me that we’re getting very far by saying, “Stop raping us! Stop it! I mean it! Stop raping us!” We know that most rapists target women they know, but we still befriend them, we still drink with them, we still let our teenagers date them, we still leave our little girls alone with them. The last time I publically suggested letting young women know the real odds**, giving them a chance to learn from our experiences and make better decisions about their own safety, I got jumped all the heck over by another feminist, accusing me of blaming women for being raped. Of course men’s violence isn’t our fault, of course they should change, of course we deserve to be safe—but has the sex class men shown any indication that they’re going to change anytime soon?
I’ve never been the kind of person to sit around and wait for other people to do what I want them to, particularly after I learned, at a fairly tender age, the new-agey sounding but no less true adage that the only person one can change is oneself. I still see a lot of feminists writing and talking and acting as if we really can’t get on without the men. I understand perfectly well that they want the men; that lots of women, lots of feminists, enjoy social and sexual relationships with men despite the dangers attendant on those relationships. I also understand perfectly well that there is such a thing as heterosexual privilege, and that it is not just social, it’s economic; women who can attach themselves to a man, whether by finding one who’s halfway decent or by learning to somehow live with varying degrees of sexism and abuse—women who can accomplish this do much better materially for themselves and their children than those women who can’t, or won’t. And that’s a reality. And yet—how to account for all of us out here who are managing to muddle through, somehow, without men’s money or their penises?
Which brings me back to the historical arguments for lesbian-feminism/separatism. A woman I once knew, a radical feminist lesbian, said to me that she thought lesbianism was a personal solution. Despite the fact that 1970s lesbian feminism characterized the search for the “exceptional man” as a personal solution, lesbianism has in fact been co-opted in the last 30 years by patriarchy and the queer movement. Those lesbians who haven’t jumped on the GLBTQXYZ alphabet-soup-of-diversity bandwagon, identifying their interests with gay men and transsexuals, have crowded baaa-ing into the “we’re just like the straights!” corral, and now they’re too busy watching “Ellen” while nursing their AI babies to see lesbianism as anything more revolutionary than a genital imperative or an alternative to a sexist heterosexual relationship. So yes, I guess lesbianism would look like a personal solution to you if your relationship is just like a het marriage minus the penis, or if you’re with women because lesbian sex is just so darned hawt. But oh, back in the day, there were some lesbians who didn’t think about it that way. There were some lesbians who looked at the understanding that patriarchy is built upon the usurpation and direction of women’s emotional energy, sexuality, and labor into the support of men’s interests; they stood back and scratched their heads and said, “Hey, what would happen if we, being women, directed our emotional energy, sexuality and labor to the support of women’s interests?”
And, sadly, that question is just as relevant in 2006 as it was in 1976. There’s been lots of ranting, misinterpretation, and permutation on all sides, not the least result of which is the defanging of lesbian-feminism by the “gay rights” movement and middle-class suburbanism alluded to above. There was a lot of objection to the idea that “any woman can be a lesbian,” based, in my opinion, on a very narrow interpretation of what the word lesbian means. I don’t think that all women ought to have sexual relationships with women; frankly, I’m pretty freakin’ tired of the “pro-sex” expectation that all women should be having all kinds of sex all the time. The truth is, lots of women don’t want to have sex, and whether that’s a result of trauma and abuse or not, you’d think in a climate as hopped up on the idea of choice as this one is, the choice of celibacy or onanism would be as legitimate as any other.
Nevertheless, there are lots of ways of prioritizing relationships with women, that is, of being lesbian, without involving sexuality. As just one example, I know some women have at least discussed the possibility of living more communally, such as sharing a house with another woman and their children, in order to live more cheaply and have help with household chores and childcare, as well as companionship. Why don’t more women do this? It’s a question I, as a lesbian-feminist, cannot answer, because my social and emotional energies, as well as the financial resources I can spare, are already directed almost exclusively towards adult women.
At the same time, I’ll be the first to say that the belief that sexual orientation is innate and inborn is a big patriarchal lie. I loved BB’s post on the continuum of rape and sex, but I got very sad when she wrote, “Even if she wants to have sex with him she’s fully aware that she may not even be this lucky if she strikes out alone and finds another man to date.” Patriarchy’s convinced so many women that the only alternatives to an unsatisfying heterosexual relationship are a worse one, or being alone; even women who don’t need the financial benefits of attachment
to a man bewail their inability to find Mr. Right (*cough cough*Maureen Dowd*cough*). It’s patriarchy that tells us that sisters doin’ it for themselves is nothing but a joke or a male fantasy. If sexual proclivity is inborn and unchanging, how do we account for the hundreds or thousands of women who came out as lesbians after entering the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s? How do we explain the fact that women leave heterosexual marriages for other women every day, well into the new millenium? How to explain my own experience of transformation from hypersexual penis-worshipper to confirmed lesbian separatist in ten short years? The term “political lesbian” didn’t mean a woman who slept with women even though she didn’t want to (though that’s how some interpreted it); it meant a woman who may have been or could have been with men and who chose to grow her love and sexual attraction for women out of her political commitment to feminism. So while I don’t think for a minute that every woman ought to be relating sexually to other women, I think if more of us put our relationships with women first and set ourselves to creating economically and socially viable communities with women, a great number of us would be surprised at the loving attractions and desires that might start to surface.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read flea’s dream a few weeks back—because I’ve been to Feminist Acres, and while no one there has ever called me a tool, there’s a reason it looks like a trailer park that’s been hit by a tornado. It’s because most of the women who dream about it are content to simply dream. It’s because the little groups struggling in twos or threes or sixes to create a place that’s about, by, and for women, are able to accomplish as much as little groups of two or three or six marginalized people have accomplished throughout history—not too freakin’ much or just barely enough, depending on whether it’s a cup-half-full or half-empty kind of day. And it’s hardly their fault, because patriarchal pressure notwithstanding, lots of women say they dream about living in a community of women, of feminists, but at the end of the day they still decide to go home to hubby.
I have to say, my feminist sisters, from where I sit it looks like a lot of you want the crops without plowing up the ground. In the same way that women have been deceived by the promises of liberal/reform feminism, believing that, for example, advancement in a traditional career and traditional motherhood aren’t diametrically opposed, most women know what horror shows most men are in intimate relationships, and yet they still aren’t willing to admit the futility of the heterosexual romantic dream. Some of us seem to think men will stop raping and battering and killing just because we ask them to, as though it’s simply a misunderstanding that keeps patriarchy on its feet. Some of us want the lovely pink cinderella fantasy to be real, rather than seeing it for patriarchal claptrap designed to keep us hoping for the one man who really is decent. Some of us don’t want to understand that men are not going to hand over their privilege, that the transformation of happy heterosexuality into something real and egalitarian can’t begin until women refuse to participate in the institution as it currently exists. Think about it: Did labor unions say to workers, “Well, we know that some of you have really good jobs with employers who only exploit you a little, and you really care about your bosses, so you all keep on working. The rest of us will go on strike to try to get better wages for everybody.” Of course not. They knew that some workers’ positive experiences or fair treatment didn’t negate the analysis that the system is exploitive and only collective action in the form of refusal to participate by all will change it.
I’m not a reform feminist, so I’ll be the one to break the bad news: You can’t have both. You can’t have the McMansion in the suburbs and 2.5 kids and a golden retriever and a white picket fence and a minivan and a safe feminist world, because the amerikan dream of suburban bliss is built upon the subjugation and victimization of women all over the world. The very earliest insights of the second wave of feminism were that the nuclear family is a major site of women’s oppression. Men have access to women and children there, away from everyone else’s eyes, and they have proven over and over ad nauseum that they will not stop using their precious privacy to degrade and abuse “their” women and children in any way they desire.
If we really want that safe feminist world, women are going to have to give up male approval and male love and start to build something with other women—not because rape is our fault or because justice is our responsibility but because men like raping women and they like hitting women and they like controlling women and they’re not going to stop until they have to. All that rhetoric about “giving up heterosexual privilege” wasn’t about being politically correct or cool or cutting edge; it was about the recognition that justice can’t co-exist with the systems of privilege that created the injustice in the first place.
But wait, you say, all this is assuming that women are in these relationships of their own free will. What about poor women? What about women internationally? What about incest? And I say to you, imagine if we feminists with, to paraphrase Andrea Dworkin, a little slack in our leashes, joined forces, really joined forces to give ourselves and each other a real alternative. What kind of refuges could we create for ourselves and women who don’t have the little bit of privilege western capitalism has granted some women here in the US? What kind of communities could we create where little girls could grow up free, away from the males who prey on them? Where women running from pimps, from violent husbands, from the street could find a place to stay? Where men couldn’t rape women because there wouldn’t be any men around? Of course it’s utopian, we’d probably never be perfectly safe, but how much are you willing to risk for the chance? Is the opportunity for sexual and economic safety and autonomy for women and girls worth as much as your dream of the perfect man? Is it worth more than a minivan? Is it worth as much as a three-bedroom colonial? Is it worth more than running water and central heating? Really, what’s it worth to you?
Don’t think I’m saying it will be easy. Men will probably freak out if they see lots of “their” women (not just those throwaway hairy fat dyke freaks) actually making real attempts at solidarity; look how much just the ideas of feminism put forward on blogs and internet bulletin boards scare the shit out of them. So they’re going to put up a fuss. But I believe we can make a start, because I’ve seen it done by just a few women who are willing to dedicate the bulk of their time, energy and resources to it, and who are willing to give up a lot of the comforts and conveniences most of us think we can’t live without. I know can’t do it by myself, and I’m as scared as any of you. But I just keep thinking, what if there were 10 or 50 or 1000 of us and we were holding out our hands to each other and saying, “I’m scared, but I’m ready to make other women my priority so that we can start to build the world we want, together.” What if?
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*Referring here to the so-called “second wave” of feminism in the US, which is not to ignore the fact that various movements of women internationally and throughout history have been detailing the abuse they’ve suffered at the hands of men.
**By posting part of this article by Pearl Cleage (who is heterosexual) on a feminist bulletin board.
