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GEMERAL FEMINISM * by Flick Ruby
The ultimate goal of feminism is to make feminism unnecessary. And that
makes feminism different from other political movements in this country.
1
Women consititute half the worlds population, perform nearly two thirds of
the world's work, receive one tenth of the world's income and own less than
one hundreth of the worlds wealth UN decade of women 1975-85 findings. 2
Male Identificaion means internalising the values of the colonizer and
actively participating the carrying our the colonization of oneself and
one's sex., Male identification is the way whereby women place men above
women including themselves, in credibility status, and importance in most
situations regardless of the comparitive quality the women may bring to the
situation. 3
"My own journey has been from unawareness to assigning responsibility for
my world," she concluded. "by understanding that the forces that oppress me
have that power only because I cooperate with them. These forces seem
impenetrable - the Pentagon, the Multinationals. They seem to hate the
world parceled out and under control. But I challenge them because they
don't create justice. I take my cooperation away, and I encourage others
to do the same. We can make change when large numbers of us act in unity.
4
"Male language allows males to participate fully in it, while females can
do so only be abstracting themselves from their concrete identities as
females. 5
"She wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a
woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which
comes only when sex is unconscious of itself" 6
Men describe the world from their own point of view which they confuse with
absolute truth 7
Mechaniam, as a metaphysics and an epistimelogy not nly spread from physics
to chemistry and biology, but also to physicology, psychology, religion,
poetry, ethics, political theory and art. 8
Heidi Hartmann defines patriarchy as: a set of social relations between
men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchial, establish
or create interdependence and solitaridy among men that enable them to
dominate women. Though patriarchy is hierarchial and men of different
places in the patriarchy they, are also united in their shared relationship
of dominance over thier women, they are dependent on eachother to maintain
that domination...in the hierarchy of patriarchy, all men, whatever their
rank in the partriarchy are bought off by being able to control at least
some women. 9
Feminism for me is the desire to remove the necessity for women to turn off
to survive, to accept the situation which is unbearable because 'everyone
else does'. Feminism is having a big shit detector which can make an
entire day utterely miserable because feminists cannot hang their politics
up on a hook before they go "out". 10
Feminist NOTICE. Being a feminist means NOTICING being aware of the
details, seeing as meaningful what most see as incidental. For this we are
accused of paranoia. The mind's behind ASIO, CIA etc play on the word
paranoia for one is easliy dismissed if one is paraniod and again in the
cloak of a joke the truth slips by, not taken in, registered or even
contemplated. All people who ponder the possiibilities who notice the
connections who are cracking the code of the powers that be are labeled
paranoid. And when people that you think you know start revealing that
they are the enemy, start threatening you, messing with you car, playing
power games that involve ancient words and symbols, when people keep popping
up to the point where coincidence seems inconcievable , you can get
paraniod or you can laugh. 11
Our humor turns our anger into a fire . 12
Power which can only be expressed deviously, secretly or through
manipulation is always suspected of being dangerous or evil." 13
As feminsts, we inhabit the world in a new way. We see the world in a new
way. We threaten to turn it upside down and inside out . We intend to
change it so totally that someday the text of masculinsts writers will be
anthropological curiosities. What was that Mailer talking about, our
descendants will ask, should they come upon his work in some obscure
archive. And they will wonder - bewildered, sad, at the masculinist
glorification of war, the masculinist mystifications around killing maiming
violence and pain; the tortured masks of phallic heroism; the main
arrogance of phallic supremacy, the impoverished renderings of mothers and
daughters, and so of life iteself. They will ask did those people really
believe in those gods? 14
When she does utter the unutterable and name this schism he has created, he
will blame the messenger and call her the seperatist. 15
They the masculinists, have told us that they write about the human
condition, that their themes are the great themes - love, death, heroism,
suffering, history itself, They have told us that our themes - love,
death, heroism, suffering history itself are trivial because we are by our
nature - trivial.
I renounce masculinist art. It is not art which illuminates the human
condition - it illuminates only and to men's final and ever lasting shame,
the masculinist world and as we look around us , that world is not one to
be proud of. Masculinist art, the art of centuries of men is not
universal, or the final explication of what being in the world is. It is,
in the end descriptive only of a world in which women are subjegated,
submissive, enslaved, robbed of full becoming, distinguished only by
carnality, demeaned. I say, my life is not trivial; my sensibility is nor
trivial, my struggle is not trivial. Nor was my mothers, or her mother's
before her. I renounce those who hate women, who have contempt for women
who ridicule and demean women, and when I do, I renounce most of the art,
masculinst are, ever made. 16
"But while the male half is termed all of culture, men have not forgotten
there is a female 'emotional half'. They live it on the sly., As the
result of their battle to reject the female in themselves, they are unable
to take love seriously as a cultural matter, but they can't do without it
altogether. Love is the underbelly of (male) culture just as love is the
weak spot of every man bent on proving his virility in that large male
world of travel and adventure. Women have always known that men need love,
and how they deny this need. Perhaps this explains the peculiar contempt
women so universally feel for men." 17
Talked to X yesterday and was slipping back into the old "well for a man he
has his thoughts together etc etc" and then you talk to the woman in his
life - Y- a bigger legend I'll go a long way to find and she said some
really hard things that bought me right back down to earth. 18
HE had no crippling doubts about his role nor about the function and value
of marriage. To him it was simply an economic arrangement to some selfish
benefit; one that would most easily satisfy his physical needs and
reproduce his heirs. His wife too, was clear about her duties and rewards:
ownership of herself and of her sexual psychological and housekeeping
services for a lifetime, in return for long term patronage and protection
by a member of the ruling class, and in her turn limited control over a
household and over her children until they reached a certain age. Today
this contract based on divided roles has been so disguised by sentiment
that it goes completely unrecognized by millions of newly weds, and even
most older married couples. 19
"Men are not oppressed as men, and hence not in a position to be liberated
as men. This dilema has prevented - thus far - the creation of a theory
(and a language) of liberation which speaks specifically to men. Everyday
language , with its false diachotomies of masculinity - feminity,
male-female, oscures the bonds of domnance of men over women, feminist
theory illuminated those bonds and the experience of women within
patriarchy but has little need to comprehend the experience of being male.
In the absence of such formulation, masculinity seems often to be a mere
negative quality, oppressive in its exercies to both men and women,
indistinguishable from oppression per se. What would a theory look like
which accounts for the many froms of being a man can take. An answer to
that question poses not a 'tragedy' by and opportunity" 20
"An aggrandisment in false apology is still an aggrandizement" 21
"The ruling classes of capitalist countries and their hired agents exault
bourgeois so called 'democracy' to the skies. But the fact remains that
under capitalism the great majority of women are inhumanly exploited and
they suffer from numerous disabilities, from restrictions of their rights in
public and political life, from degrading marriage and divorce laws, which
place women in humiliating and inferior position to men, from economic
dependence and household drudgery" 22
"To sell a brain is worse than to sell a body, for when the body seller has
sold her momentary pleasure, she takes good care that the matter shall end
there. But when a breainseller has sold her brain, its anaemic, vicious
and diseased progency, are let loose upon the world, to infect and corrupt
and sow the seed of disease in others" 23
The women say, you are really a slave if ever there was one. Men have make
what diferentiated them from you the sign of domination and possession.
They say, you will never be numerous enough to spit on their phallus, you
will never be suffieiencly determined to stop speaking their language, to
burn their currency theur effigied their works of art their symbols. They
say, men have foreseen everything, they have christened your revolt in
advance a slave revolt, a revolt against nature, they call it revolt when
you want to appropriate what tis their, the phallus. The women say, I
refuse henceforward to speak this language I refuse to mumble after them
the words lack of penis lack of money lack of insignia lack of name. I
refuse to pronounce the names of possession and non-possession, they say,
If I take over the world, let it be to dispossess myself of it
immediatesly, let it be to forge new links between myself and the world.
24
>From books films and experiences which afirmed that which we know from
books and films, we know what she/he wants . We act and react accordingly.
We react to his/her knowing what he/she wants. We count on that which we
know from books and films and experiences, indeed being accurate.
Samuel has make his way to my breasts. They remain lifeless. I still
don't love them. How dreadful that pleasure can arise even though I dont
love myself, even though love of self and love of another are detached from
one another, like talk and love, like work and love, like pleasure and
love.
He bows his head, at last he can rest it for a moment. I take him in.
Once again I look down on a man's head resting between my breasts. What is
he searching for.
I start running, Samuel disappears, the distance seperating us remains the
same. Is Samuel a mirage? Is my need to be nurtured a mirage? I would
like to put a stop to this at once, would like to move away from him, look
him in the eyes, talk to him, fall asleep with him. Is my vagina moist?
Is his penis hard? Have all the preperations been make for reuniting the
disunited? Vagina-Penis has become a surrogate unity, a substitute for all
severed relationships. 25
"Love requires a mutual vulnerability that is impossible to achieve in an
unequal power situation. Thus falling in love is no more that the process
of alteration of male vision - through idealisation, mystification,
glorification that renders void the womans class inferiority. 26
Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice
should undersand that it is not terrifically important to us that they
learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence
against us . 27
The anger of the survivor is murderous. It is more dangerous to her than
to the one who hurt her. She does not believe in murder, even to save
herself. She does not believe in murder, even though it would be more
merciful punishment than he deserves. She wants him dead but will not kill
him. She never gives up wanting him dead.
The clarity of the survivor is chilling. Once she breaks out of the prison
of terror and violence in which she has been nearly destroyed, a process
that takes years, it is very difficult to lie to her or to manipulate her.
She sees through the social strategies that have controlled her as a woman,
the sexual strategites that have reduced her to a shadow of her own native
possibilities. She knows that her life depends on never being taken in by
romantic illusions or sexual hallucination......So what have I learned? I
have learned not to believe in suffering. It is a form of death. If it is
severe enough it is a poison; it kills the emotions." She knows that some
of her own emotions have been killed and she mistrusts those who are
infactuated with suffering, as if it were a source of life, not death. In
her heart she is a mourner for those who have not survived. In her soul
she is a warrior for those who are now as she was then. In her life she is
both celebrant and proof of women's capacity and will to survive, to
become, to act, to change self and sociey. And each year she is stronger
and there are more of her. 28
"Yes I too have been very afraid of my anger. But I think that if we can
begin to free ourselves of the lie we've accepted about what it is to be an
angry woman-a gorgon-if we can begin to believe in our anger as a healing
force, then our own belief in it as that will cause men to begin to
experience it in a different way. And our danger from them will decrease.
In fact, I think the reason that men are so very violent is that they know,
deep in themselves, that they're acting out a lie, and so they're furious.
You can't be happy living a lie, and so they're furious at being caught up
in the lie. But they don't know how to break out of it, so they just go
further into it. 29
Sandra Boston saw a scene in a move once that made a lasting impression.
A man was picketing the White House in the middle of the night, caring a
placard about stopping war. Nobody was there to see him except a night
watchman who walked over to the man and said, "You know, you aren't going
to change the world." The protester kept on marching but said, "I'm trying
to keep the world from changing me." 30
"Val gazed at her sympathetically. 'I know. That's what makes things so
hard. And of course, our sort of radicalizm is the most threatening sort
ever to come down the pike. Not because we have guns and money. They
tried to laugh us out of existence, now they're trying to tokenize us out
of existence, the way they've done with blacks, not very successfully, I
think - but their refusal to take us seriously at all is a measure of their
terror.
31
If pornography releases sexual frustration, why don't we send recipe books
to the starving? 32
The rebel sons wanted phallic power to be secular and "democratic" in the
male sense of the word; that is, they wanted to fuck at will, as a
birthright. With a princely arrogance that belied their egalitarian
pretensions, they wanted to wield penises, not guns, as emblems of manhood.
They did not repudiate the illegitimate power of the phallus: they
repudiated the authority of the father that put limits of law and
concention on their lust. They did not argue against the power of the
phallus; they argued for pleasure as the purest use to which it could to
put. 33
If I use contraceptives, I get sicker than I already am. In order to be
able to sleep with a man, I have to become a patient. 34
Nobody likes pain, anguish and fear; but Joanna Macy insits that we cant
act until we experience it. In her view, despair isn't craziness; it is an
appropriate respose to the daily news. It represents an understanding of
the unity of all life, and a sensitivity to the serious threat to that
life. When we drop our defenses and let grief and apprehension surface,
we are released from paralysis, and connected to all life. "Through our
despair," she writes "something more profound and pervasive comes to light.
It is our interconnectedness, our inter-existence. Beyond our pain and
because of our pain, we awaken into that ...Despair work, experienced in
this fashion, is consciousness-raising in the truest sense of that term.
It increases our awareness, not only of the perils that face us, but also
to the promise inherent in the human heart.." 35
The only way we can come out of hiding, break through our paralysing
defenses, is to know it all - the full extent of sexual violence and
domination of women. In knowing, in facing directly we can learn to chart
out course out of this oppression, by envisioning and creating a world
which will preclude female sexual slavery" 36
"Some days I feel dead, I feel like a robot, treading our time. Some days,
I feel terribly alive, with hair like wires and a knife in my hand. Once
in a while my mind slips and I think I am back in my dream and that I have
shut the door, the one without a handly on the inside. I imagine that
tommorrow I will be pounding and screaming to be let out, but no one will
hear, no one will come. Other times I think I have gone over the line,
like LiIly, like Val, and can no longer speak anything but truth...
Maybe I need a keeper. I don't want them to lock me up and give me
electric shock until I forget. Forget: lethe: the opposite of truth.
I have opened all the doors in my head.
I have opened all the pores in my body.
But only the tide rolls in.
Marylin French The Women's Room.
The smoke of the burned witches still hangs in our nostrils; most of all,
it reminds us to see ourselves as seperated, isolated units in copetition
with eachother, alienated, powerless, alone. 37
During the 16th and 17th centuries, Western society was undergoing massive
changes. THe witch hunts were an expression both of the weadening of
traditional restraints and of an increase in new pressures. It was a
relolutionary time, but the persecutions helped to undermine the possiblity
of a revolution that would benedit women. THe changes that occured
benefited the rising monied professional classes and made possible the
ruthless and extensive exploitation of women, working people and nature.
As paet of that change, the persecusiton of witches awas linked to 3
interconnected processes; the expropriation of land and natural resources,
the expropriation of knowledge; and the war against the consciousness of
immanence which was embodied in women, sexuality and magic. 38
Their customs were the expression - in actions songs, costumes,
celebrations - of the organic unity of the human community and the oneness
of the peasant with the land and its gifts. 39
And then he raised his eyes to her face and was sad. For sufficient
reasons he was very sensitive to the tragedies of women, and he knew it was
a tragedy that such a face should surmount such a body. For her body would
imprison her in soft places, she would be allowed no adventures other than
love, no achievements other than births. But her face was haggard, in
spite of its youth, with appetite for travel in the hard places of the
world, for the adventures and achievements that are the birth right of any
man. 40
"But it's hard for being punished just for what you are" 41
He stood, nodded, smiled, pointed to the seat, I sat, he gave me a
cigarette, I smoked, I drank coffee, he talked, I listened, he talked, I
built castles out of paper on table tops, he talked, oh I was so quiet, so
soft, all brazen thighs to the naked eye, to his dead and ugly eye, but
inside I wanted him to see inside I was all aquiver, all trembling and
dainty, all worried and afraid, nervy and a pale invalid, all pathetic
need contaminated by intellect that was like wild weeds, wild weeds,
massively killing the fragile gentle flower garden inside, those pruned and
fragile little flowers. This I conveyed by being quiet and tender and oh
so quiet, and I could see my insides all running with blood, all running
with knife cuts and big fuck bruises and he saw it too. 42
I am numb. I want to cry but I do not cry. I dont cry over rape anymore.
I burn but I don't cry. I shake but I don't cry. I get sick to my stomach
but I don't cry. I scream inside so that my silent shrieking drowns the
awful pounding of my heart but I don't cry. I am too weak to move but I
don't cry"
43
"I am underground, under water, eyes closed because of the bitter saltiness
of the water, wringing my hand in disbelief. X bashed Y up. My indierct
but very real pain hasn't screamed, just hummed quietly like the
electricity cables do. I feel like a big electircity monster and I want to
march up the highway, stalk my way leaving shrieks that haunt children into
their twenties and set fire to him. He said and did it all in just one
night. The betrayal, the hate, the shame stains my day RED. The red of
raw, the red of the blood that must have been shed. 44
Taoist China considered red a sacred color associated with women, blood,
sexual potency and creative power. White was the colour of men, semen,
negative influences, passsivity and death. This was the basic Tantric idea
of male and female essences. The male principle was seen as "passive" and
quiescent' the female principle as "active" and "creative" the reverse of
later patriarchial views." 45
"Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over ther the figure of Sir
Charles Biron is not concealed? We are all women you assure me? Then I may
tell you the very next words I read were these 'Chloe liked Olivia...' Do
not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society
that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women" 46
No movement has ever been more than an accumilaion of small motions of
people acting within their own sheres. In rearranging our lives, we
participate in rearranging the life of society. The qualities on which we
have depended for several millennia, which we have imagined kept us afloat
- power-in-the-world, possesssion, status, hierarchy, tradition - are in
fact sweeping us to ruin what is necessary to prevent that ruin are the
very qualities we have leared to trust - the flexible, fluid, transient
elements of affection and communality.
The past had its moment; we have ours. After a moment all life dies and is
transformed, transubstantiated. The end of life is the continuation of
life, the means we use to attain that end is the mode in which we live it .
All of us, victors and victims, and we are all both, are transitory. Like
the world, we are passing. We are like soldier ants, moving from a
depleted area to seek food beyond, in an unexplored terrain. We have
encountered a river that sepatates us from sight of the future; we have a
choice only to die where we stand or to enter it . The ants always enter
and drown. They drown by the millions, and in their death add their bodies
to a bridge on which the survivors can cross over to what they hope will be
richer grounds, as the devoured terrain behind them regenerated itself.
All of us, members of transitory generations, help to create the bridge by
which the past continues its the future. But if our lives are filled with
self denial, self punishment, empty rewards, illusory goals, and the
mutilations of power and obedience, then neither our lives nor our legacy
is worth the pain. Only pleasure in the journey can make thejourney
worthwhile, and our pleasure in our journey is also a legacy to those who
follow.
And if we fail? We fail: to turn the world of wicked Lady Macbeth to good
purpose. The goal - feminizing the world - is also the means - feminizing
our worlds. The end is the process: integrating ourselves and carrying
integration as far into the world as we can. There is no final end, there
is only the doing well, being what we want to be , doing what we want to
do, living in delight. The choice lies between a life lived through and a
life lived; between fragmentation and wholeness; between leaving behind us,
as generations before us have done, a legacy of bitterness, sacrafice, and
fear, and leaving behind us, if nothing more than this, a memory of our own
being and doing with pleasure, an image of a life our young will want to
emulate rather than avoid. The choice lied between servitude and freedom,
fragmentation and integration. The choice may be beween death and life. 47
New structures can emerge sucessfully only in resopnse to a new or
different set of ends. When we value pleasure - human well being - as much
as profit (power), new sturctures will seem to generate themselves. 48
It's taken women a long time to say why nuclear power is a women's issue.
We are the first affetcted by it, and that's why we have to take it real
personally. I speak a lot at anti-nuclear rallies - I get up ther eand I'm
(1) the only women and (2) the only non-white - they get two birds with one
stone! Women have got to demand that we speak, because men are dong all
the talking at the moment. We have a saying - Women are the backbone, and
men are the jawbone; and it's true in every society. I'm not saying that
we should be the jawbone, but that men be a little more of the backbone. 49
We must also demand that our politics serve our sexuality. To often, we
have asked secuality to serve politics instead. Ironically the same
movements that have criticised sexual repression and boring morality have
them selves too often tried to mould their sexual feelings to serve the
correct political theory. 50
Love, the strongest and deepsest element in all life, the harginger of hope
of joy, of ecstasy; love the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love
the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an
all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church
begotten weed, marriage?...
Some day, some day men and women will rise, they will reach the mountain
peak, they will meet big and strong and free, ready to receive, to partake
and to bask in the golden rays of love. What fancy, what imagination, what
poetic genius can foresee even approximately the potentialities of such a
force in the life of men and women. If the world is ever to give birth to
true companionship and oneness, not marriage, but love will be the parent.
51
Salvation lies in an energetic march onward towards a brighter and clearer
future. We are in need of unhampered growth out of old traditions and
habits. The movement for womens emancipation has so far made but the first
step in that direction. It is to be hoped that it will gather strength to
make another. The right to vote, or equal civil rights, may be good
demands but true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in the
courts. It begins in woman's soul. History tells us that every oppressed
class gained true liberation from its masters through its own efforts. It
is necessary that woman learn that lesson, that she realize that her
freedom will reach as far as her power to achieve her freedom reaches. It
is therefor, far more important for her to begin with her inner
regeneration, to cut loose from the weight of prejudices, traditions, and
customs. The demand for equial rights in every vocation of life is just and
fair; but after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be
loved. Indeed, if partial emancipation is to become a complete and true
emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion
that to be loved, to be sweetheart and mother, is synonymous with being
slave or subordinate. It will have to do away with the absurd notion of
the dualism of the sexes, or that man an woman represent two antagonistic
worlds.
Pettiness seperates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big. Let us not
overlook vital things because of the bulk of trifles confronting us. A
true conception of the relation of the sexes will not admit of conqueror
and conquerd. It knows of but one real thing. To give of one's self
boundlessly, in order to find ones self richer, deeper, better. That alone
can fill the emptiness, and transform the tragedy of womans emancipation
into joy, limitless joy." 52
1. Dworkin, Andrea Feminism an Agenda in Letters from the War Zone
2. UN Decade of Women findings
3. Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience
4. Powell &Cheatham This Way Daybreak Comes, New Soc. Press 1986
5. Spender, Dale Man Made Language
6. Woolf, Virginia A Room of Ones Own
7. de Beauvoir, Simone The Second Sex
8. Morgan Robin, The Demon Lover Norton 1987
9. This Way Daybreak COmes
10. Job Application, F. Ruby
11. ibid
12.
13.Olsen, Carl The Book of The Goddess
14. Dworkin, Andrea Our Blood
15. ibid
16. ibid
17. Firestone, SHulamith THe Dialectic of Sex
18. Diary
19. Firestone ibid
20. Sattle, Jack Men Inexpressiveness and Power
21. Spivak
22. Popora,N Women in Russia
23. Woolf V ibid
24. Wittig, Monique Les Guerillere
25. Stefan, Verena Shedding
26. Firestone ibid
27. Dworkin Andrea The Rape Atrocity and the BOy Next Door in Letters
from The War ZOne
28. Dworkin, Andrea A Battered Wife Survives in Letters From The War
Zone
29. Demming Barbara Reweaving the Web, New Soc. Press 1982
30. This Way Daybreak Comes ibid
31. French Marylinb, The WOmens Room
32. Dworkin
33. Dworkin Why So-called Radical men lovea nd need Porn
34. Stefan, V ibid
35. This Way Daybreak Comes
36. Rich, Aidrienne ibid
37. French, Maryln. The WOmen's Room ibid
38 Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark, Beacon Press 1982
39. ibid
40. West, Rebecca The Judge Virago
41. ibid
42. Dworkin Andrea, Fire and Ice
43. ibid
44. diary
45. Womens Book Of Myths and Secrets
46. Woolf ibid
47. French Marylin Beyond Power ibid
48. ibid
49. Interview with Winowa La Duke, Spare Rib Readerm Ruth Wallsgrove
50. Starhawk ibid
51. Goldman, Emma, Marriage and Love
52. Goldman, Emma Social Institutions