dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Dave Gross) (04/09/91)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Here we go again. My apologies to those of you who saw a version of this on soc.women. Someone at my site wants this posted anonymously and has asked me to post it for them. This is a forwarded post, so please edit the attribution line if you choose to follow-up. If you want to reply to the original poster, please post or swallow it. If it's really urgent, I could forward it, but I would prefer not to become a postman for all of the flames this post might generate. My personal opinion is that this article is a disgusting pile of sexist rubbish, so don't blame me for it if you agree with me. My understanding is that this represents three parts of a multi-part article that has been circulating through some alternative women's publications in California. I believe this is a different version from the one posted to soc.women recently. Sorry about the huge disclaimer. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> One Woman's Struggle by Adrianne Hyster On April 1, 1984, my prison term began. I was sentenced to ten years for voluntary manslaughter after poisoning my husband. That I entered prison on April Fool's Day was just the punch-line from a smirking patriarchy that refused to protect me from abuse, but took great pleasure in punishing me for escaping that abuse. The years spent before entering prison were, for the most part, a struggle in survival. Now that I am in prison, I have time to write. The paper you are about to read is a celebration of the feminist movement -- that movement that gave me the strength and motivation I needed to liberate myself. Because of a Supreme Court ruling, I, as a prisoner, cannot publish this under my own name. I also have changed a few details about my story so as to avoid reprisals from prison officials. Because of my position behind bars, it will be difficult for me to refute the foul legends about my person dished up in the male press. So read my story with the knowledge that I cannot directly respond to these attacks. This paper is not for men; it is for women -- feminist women who believe in feminism with their hearts and their minds. When I get out of prison I will speak to you all, since I know that more can be conveyed in personal conversation than through writing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I grew up in Berkeley, California, and went through the public schools at the time when the Universities were in turmoil over free speech and anti-war issues. As separate as I was from these activities, I remember when Ronald Reagan, then governor, tear-gassed the campuses that were in revolt, and I could not understand the hatred of men. Dissatisfied with the prospect of being a housewife-slave like my mother, or a business-oppressor like my father, I decided to become an artist, and enrolled over the wishes of my parents in an art school. It was there that two things happened to change my life: First: I was introduced to feminist literature. Second: I met the man who was to be my husband. I was not very much involved in the political struggles going on at that time. As in any struggle, there were the fighters, the lukewarm, and the traitors. I was passively lukewarm. My roommate, however, was very much a fighter. "Don't ever forget that you are a woman, of woman born!" she told me, with such urgency that I knew it was supposed to mean something. At the time, it meant nothing to me. But in a short time I had become a fanatical 'Feminist,' though the term was not descriptive of what we now know of as radical feminism. This was a Feminism that still had room for men and still glorified heterosexuality. But it represented an elemental cry of women for a union with the prehistoric matriarchy -- a cry that rose when it seemed to some people (and certainly to my roommate) that the collapse of the patriarchy was imminent -- and a longing to return to the never-forgotten ancestral home. But those, like my roommate, who bore the burdens of this struggle, were pained most by the fact that the patriarchy was morally whitewashed by the seeming alliance with women caused by compulsory heterosexuality, with the result that the slow extermination and cooption of feminism was in a certain sense sanctioned by women themselves. At the time, none of this was clear to me, and I spurned the advances of my roommate to eventually marry a male. Looking back, I realize now that feminism can only be safeguarded by the destruction of what is now known as the women's movement -- simply claiming an interest in "women's issues" is no substitute for feminism -- and that the women's movement as it is now known is destined to be the misfortune of women. ******************************************************************************* I will not go into too many details about my courtship and marriage. It is painful to me still to think about this. It only needs to be said that I fell (and notice how applicable that word is) in love -- or into that acquiescence to slavery that the patriarchy drills into women under the name of love. Can there be real love between two people socially destined to be master and slave? No. True love requires people who are equals. I will say this without reservation: Love between men and women under the patriarchy is a myth. There is no such thing, and the pursuit of this myth is deadly to women's souls. But I was obviously blind to this truth while I was at school, and it was only long after I had dropped out that it began to dawn on me that there was a menace of which I had previously not even known the name, and whose terrible importance for women I certainly did not understand: the Patriarchy. I had loved art, had loved the creation of art which sisters have long used to keep alive stirrings of the matriarchy (in quilts and other domestic items whose unspoken message was passed down to women children through the generations), but had hated art school. Each day in class I was taught more and more about MALE artists, MALE-defined periods of history, and more often than not by MALE professors. And each day I was exposed to the female nudes exploited by one century's or another's pornographers. And yet there was little protest from the other women classmates. How often, even today, does a woman rise in high moral indignation when they hear some so-called feminist state that it is all the same to her whether she is a woman or a man, that both are "equal" and that there is nothing particular about womanhood to be proud of? How many women are aware of the infinite number of separate memories in the collective female-goddess psyche of the great potential of our sex -- our nurturance, our intuition, our connection with Mother Earth -- whose total result is to inspire them with just pride at being of womankind? My marriage offered me an opportunity to drop out of art school, as I believed as I had been told that my husband would rescue me from financial worry. This was not to be. To me, the Bay Area, which to so many is the epitome of innocent pleasure, represents, I am sorry to say, merely the living memory of the saddest period in my life. ******************************************************************************* What I knew of feminism in my youth was exceedingly little and very inaccurate. I was very pleased, of course, about the old battle for sufferage, and naively thought that women, having gotten the vote, would in a matter of time change the world. I reasoned that since the patriarchy existed by oppressing women, enfranchising women into the patriarchy would transform it. Consequently, although I was not an active Feminist (or, as they say nowadays, "I'm no women's libber, but..."), the activities of Feminists were not displeasing to me. And the fact that Feminism, the old Feminism, strove to improve the conditions of women, as, in my innocence, I was still stupid enough to believe, likewise seemed to speak for it rather than against it. What repelled me most against this brand of Feminism was its hostile attitude toward the pride of women in favor of some theory of "equality." It was only several years later that I was enlightened by the works of Susan Wolgast, who wrote in "Equality and the Rights of Women": "[A]rguing for women's rights under the banner of equality encourages women to identify their interests with those of men... "In the case of race it seems clear that skin color and hair and features are unimportant, being superficial. They are mere physical marks. Can one say the same about the differences of sex? That is not so clear... "To compare sex and race in this way implies that reproductive differences and reproduction itself should not much affect our social arrangements..." How absurd it now seems that women should ignore our unique life-giving abilities and their special sensitivity to the Earth and her people and to life everywhere, in order that we should claim "equality" to men -- the life-takers, the Earth-destroyers. Yet over and over again I heard these women talk about "equality" and about how we were really no better or no worse than men -- the men that were at that very moment destroying the earth, killing its people, and oppressing its women. It was then that I realized that the Feminist movement had been coopted virtually from its beginning -- that instead of being a movement of global transformation, designed to return a deeply troubled world back to the promise of a peaceful matriarchy; it had become concerned with capitulation to some idea that women were as morally inferior as were men. But to many women, to whom immediate concerns like employment reform, divorce reform, etc. seemed more promising than a far-off paradise, this movement was very attractive, despite how much it devalued women. Not that ALL feminist groups were bad, or that the idea of a women's movement is bad -- far from it! There were women at that time -- Valerie Solanis immediately springs to mind -- who had the courage of their convictions, and the courage to act on them. But the majority of feminist groups, including the large ones which grew into groups like today's NOW, devalued women while they were pretending to uplift her. { Footnote: I have been made aware that some of my readers may not be familiar with Valerie Solanis. I'll quote an excerpt from something Robin Morgan wrote about her: "Valerie Solanis should be known primarily as an artist, not as someone who shot Andy Warhol. Her filmscripts and other writings have not received the attention they deserve. She is still being persecuted by police and `mental health' authorities for her `attempted murder' of Warhol, and has been in and out of prisons ever since." } Let me make this perfectly clear: There is no institution of the patriarchy -- no court, no legislature, no forum of grievance -- that CAN be utilized to destroy the patriarchy and allow the matriarchy to return and flower. As long as no path within the patriarchy exists, and there clearly is no such path, the elimination of this evil can only be decided by superior power. Women have this power and must use it. And it is men who stand in the way. Only a knowledge of the males provides the key with which to comprehend the inner, and consequently real, aims of the most horrible and accomodationist branches of Feminism. Today it is difficult for me to say when I first thought of "men" as the enemy and not as just a generic reference to our species. True, throughout youth and school, men were looked at with suspicion. Our mothers told us to look out for "strange men" and we often heard stories about girls being abducted and raped and killed by men. But most of us believed then that these men were monsters, like the villains in fairy tales. We didn't associate this terror, except subliminally, with the maleness of the perpetrators. Men, initially, were characterized for me by little more than their larger build, their deeper voices, in short the differences in their bodies. All else, I suspected, was similar to the rest of us. But soon I developed doubts. Men were not simply large women with different hormones and sex-parts -- they are a people in themselves. Soon I began to see people as two camps -- men and women -- and not simply as two fine divisions in a united humanity. Men and women have, since the destruction of the matriarchy, had opposing interests. Women have, for instance, been responsible for maintaining and nurturing life as all around them, men have been trying to destroy life. It looked, to be sure, as though only a part of the male gender approved of the wanton murder, rape, and destruction committed by men. But as Susan Brownmiller discovered, "Rape is a process by which ALL MEN keep ALL WOMEN in a state of fear." And, as Susan Griffin wrote: "Every women has similar stories to tell -- the first man who attacked her may have been a neighbor, a family friend, an uncle, her doctor, or perhaps her own father." Every woman shares this bond, and every man shares in the benefits of our oppression. Susan Griffin again: "[I]n the spectrum of male behavior, rape, the perfect combination of sex and violence, is the penultimate act... [I]f the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual, it may be mainly a quantitative difference." And in her concluding paragraph: "[R]ape is not an isolated act that can be rooted out from patriarchy without ending patriarchy itself. The same men ... who victimize women [are] engaged in the act of raping Vietnam, raping black people and the very earth we live upon." Men even LOOK brutal, and smell brutal, as if they were bred for brutality. Was there any form of filth without at least one Man involved in it? I ask you "equality"-minded feminists: Do WOMEN jack off to pornographic torture movies? It was terrible, that Men, in tremendous numbers, seemed chosen by Nature for this very sort of thing. Is this why they fancy themselves "superior?" I began, after this realization, to examine carefully the names of all the creators of pornography, of war, of pollution, of oppression in the history of the world. The result was less and less favorable for my previous attitude toward men. The fact that 99% of all literary filth, global oppression, rape of the earth, and warfare can be blamed directly on a gender constituting slightly less than half of the world's population, can not simply be talked away; it was the plain truth. A thousand things which I had hardly seen before now struck my notice, and others, which had previously given me food for thought, I now learned to grasp and understand. A cold shudder ran down my back when I would walk down the streets of San Francisco and recognize that men were the cold-hearted, shameless, and calculating dictators behind the oppression of the prostitutes walking the streets for men's pleasures. It was when I realized that much of the women's movement, like NOW for instance, was organized to meet men's interests of "equality" that my long soul struggle had reached its conclusion. I did not blame the women in these organizations -- they were battling against a great evil but were blinded by men who told them that their interests lay against their nature. It took me a long time to discover how the patriarchy could make women, seemingly longing for liberation, heap hatred on their own gender, despising its greatness, besmirching its herstory, and dragging its great sisters into the gutter. It was only when I grasped this uncomfortable thought that I became thoroughly acquainted with the seducer of womankind. It is now becoming more clear to more people. You will notice that more and more men, who as I demonstrated earlier have opposing interests to women, are calling themselves "feminist" and are organizing themselves in "feminist" organizations. This male doctrine calling itself "feminism" rejects the principles of nature that every women knows in her body -- that women are the natural defenders of life and the earth -- and replaces it with this revolting philosophy that women are the "equals" of the earth-rapers, the men. If, with the help of this male feminism, men are victorious over women, men will inevitably succeed in their thanatos-oriented quest to destroy all life on this planet which will then, as it did millions of years ago, move through space empty and cold. Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Goddess: by defending myself against men, I am fighting for our Mother Earth. ******************************************************************************* Many women have lost their ties to the matriarchy and to the Goddess. They have lost touch with the Goddess in themselves, and have forgotten our collective herstory. More and more women, however, are returning to spiritual womanhood, and more and more is being communicated about our destiny. I will quote here from a perceptive and eloquent spiritual guide who calls herself "Cathe": For 25,000 years before the Sky God, divinity was seen in a feminine form. In ancient Goddess cultures, creation of the universe was seen as happening through the birth process. The Great Mother was the creator of all species and all of life. She was the life force. The Goddess represented healing, harmony, peace, and communal living. The Goddess followers led joyous, life-nurturing, peaceful lives where women held positions of honor and power. The people celebrated together, purified together, worshipped together, rejoyced together, and feasted together. They lived in clan families led by the mothers. All family names, titles, possessions and territorial rights passed from the mother to the daughters. In ancient times the Goddess represented reverance for the Earth and all of life was sacred and celebrated. Violent or destructive behavior was discouraged. The sacred holy days and Sabbaths were practiced by both genders and were led by the women. Then things changed. In Europe during the Bronze Age (approximately 1500 BC), cultures developed that devoted themselves to war. Men banded together and formed the first patriarchal communities. Invader trives armed with weaponry, horses, and war chariots raided villages, impregnated women, stole children, and drove the Goddess peoples out of their lands. The patriarchal invasions occurred over many centuries and the matrifocal cultures slowly eroded due to the organized warfare. The males ruled through brute strength and aggression. Thousands of years of women's history and culture were lost or taken over by males. The early patriarchal ethics based on militaristic values and authoritarianism have become the basis of western politics, religion and family life. Since the Bronze Age coincided with written history, it seems that we have always accepted the patriarchy. Yet, somehow, the memories have been rekindled and women are beginning to reclaim the Goddess and their inherent rights to be powerful. Most of the people who call themselves feminists today have drifted far from their heritage. In an attempt to win over a larger audience, they struggle against men only on male terms. It is obvious that combatting the patriarchy on such a basis could provide males with small cause for concern. At worst, a male could always declare himself a "feminist" and avoid all further criticism. The whole movement came to look less and less like a return to the matriarchy, and more and more like an attempt to convert men to feminism, or perhaps even an expression of a certain competitive envy. Lacking was the conviction that this was a vital question for all humanity, with the fate of all women depending on its solution. All this time the Feminists thought they had men by the ears, while in reality they themselves were being led by the nose. In a short time, males had become so accustomed to this type of Feminism that they would have missed its disappearance more than its presence inconvenienced them. There is no making pacts with males; there can only be the hard either-or. ******************************************************************************* All ideas and doctrines run the risk of being seen as purposes in themselves, and should instead be seen as means to purposes. For me and for all true feminists there is but one doctrine: woman. What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our gender and of humanity, the sustenance of our children, the sanctity of our bodies, the freedom and independence from patriarchal bonds, so that all women may fulfill the mission allotted them by the Goddess Every thought and every idea, every doctrine and all knowledge, must serve this purpose. -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- "I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire." -- Robin Morgan, current editor of Ms. Magazine, in 1974