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Ain't I A Woman? newspapers, June 1970-July 1971
1971-07-02 "Ain't I a Woman?" Page 10
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MACHO AND MONOGAMY [photo] Sometimes I feel like the woman’s movement gets itself into these tight-assed institutionalized trips and ends up making you feel like you’re back in the family or the church or school. In other words, sometimes we just can’t escape our own rhetoric and dogma, and end up becoming a very repressive thing. When the women’s movement first started and a lot of us rejected traditional notions… oppresive notions… of what it meant to be a woman, of what was permissible female behavior, we were left with no identity. Like almost all the ways we used to act just wouldn’t do in the context of a life as a revolutionary feminist. So we took off on this incredible fantasy and made up an idea of what the ‘new woman’ would be and proceeded to almost destroy ourselves and each other trying to live up to our projection right now, immediately, here in the midst of the monster. We rejected the politics of guilt, but we used the tactic of guilt to push each other and ourselves to change. It was a lot of bullshit, because developing into women with revolutionized consciousness is a process, not an act or a decision. Moreover, it is ridiculous at this early point with so few women, relatively ,involved in it, to pretend that we could set up a model so soon. I mean we come to the women’s movement is pretty demented fucked-up distorted personalities. That’s what oppression does to you. Light, macho and monagamy are the two best examples I can think of. ‘Macho’ and ‘monogamy’ are hard to define in the way that the women’s movement uses them. But generally when you’re called ‘macho’, they’re trying to say that you’re acting butch, that you’re playing at being a man, that you’re aggressive. Mostly when you’re being called macho as an attack they mean that you’re generally acting like some male stud. (Macho’ comes from the Latin word machismo which basically means male chauvinist pig.) ‘Monogamy’ is a word used in a million different ways. It usually refers to two people who are lovers, and who may be into each other to the point of exclusion of others. In heterosexual monogamy, the woman is usually dependent on her man and lives through him, instead of with him. A lot of women in the women’s movement criticize macho women a lot, and spend a lot of energy avoiding ‘taking on the characteristics of men.’ They [fell] that macho intimidates and alienates other women. But it seems to me that growing up female and gay in Amerika is what intimidates and alienates women and makes us afraid of strengths of any sort. But just rejecting macho as inherently bad, as a rule we set up, doesn’t deal with the real problem which is that men have always used strength against us, against all oppressed peoples, and it is the misuse of strength which leads to domination, not the existence or style of strength. I don’t worry about macho in women.. in fact I encourage it… because I feel the thing we have to worry about the most is how we are all going to get out of the behavior and gestures of feminity; how we’re going to stop seeing ourselves as weak and passive. Women who are trying to be strong and tough have a rough time of it, because we don’t have any forms to be that in. There are a bunch of characteristics that exist in people. In sexist society, some of those characteristics are called feminine (gentleness, delicacy, sweetness, supportiveness, emotion, etc.) Some of them are called masculine (strength, power, aggression, arrogance, technical competency, achievement, etc.) Now the problem with sexism isn’t that men have technical competence and physical prowess: the problem is that ONLY men can legimately have these characteristics, and that their skills and aptitudes are used against women and therefore become perverted. Technology, like physical strength, is not inherently bad, It’s the oppressive applications that reek. In the hands of the right people (oppressed people) almost all competencies can become constructive energy sources. So if we in the women’s movement reject as ‘male’ every characteristic assigned to men by pig society, then we’re accepting their sexist categories and I don’t understand how we intend to win our war. If women start strutting around (instead of swishing about) and start wearing leather jackets (instead of dainty cloth coats) and chewing on toothpicks and swearing alot and getting into fights (instead of sitting at home polishing our toenails) well that doesn’t seem to me such a crisis. I’m worried about our tendencies to be submissive and to eat more shit than is good for our souls, to subordinate our struggle to other struggles out of guilt, to be wimpy and scared and paralyzed. Once it is not a dramatic act to walk down the street holding hands with our girlfriends, once rejecting rape-minded advances isn’t guerrilla theatre, once wanting to be a plumber isn’t ‘cute’.. then we may be free enough to develop whole new ways of being strong. I don’t understand what feminists mean when they say we should totally reject role-playing. I don’t understand what I would do, how I would act, if I didn’t role-play. It’s not like we’re so free, our vibes are so clear, and we are so unfettered that there is some ‘natural’ way of being. One makes decisions about one’s behavior every time she acts in any way. Like when I stopped wearing makeup and miniskirts, and I wondered how I should dress, feminists told me to just dress with whatever was at hand and was practical. Now that is ridiculous. I have to go out and rip off or buy anything that might just ‘be at hand’..clothes don’t spring into my drawers on their own. The thing I actually had to do, was pick a new role, a new set of behavior patterns. And I think it’s real cool for women to experiment with all sorts of roles in all sorts of mannerisms until something really does click and feels natural. It’s the same with defenses. Feminists are always talking about breaking down defenses. Well that seems to me to be suicidal. We’re living in this evil jungle where the last thing I plan to be is defenseless. The women’s movement should help us develop BETTER defenses it seems to me. It should help us develop more control over our defenses, so that we are able to let them down when we’re sure it’s safe. But who the fuck can win a war without self-defense on every level. I will not give up my aggressiveness and my macho because I want to survive until the time that they become irrelevant to my happiness. Then there’s another piece of dogma that a lot of us dragged with us from the straight woman’s movement. Smash monogamy. In the very beginning of the Page 10 Volume 1 Number 17 Ain’t I
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MACHO AND MONOGAMY [photo] Sometimes I feel like the woman’s movement gets itself into these tight-assed institutionalized trips and ends up making you feel like you’re back in the family or the church or school. In other words, sometimes we just can’t escape our own rhetoric and dogma, and end up becoming a very repressive thing. When the women’s movement first started and a lot of us rejected traditional notions… oppresive notions… of what it meant to be a woman, of what was permissible female behavior, we were left with no identity. Like almost all the ways we used to act just wouldn’t do in the context of a life as a revolutionary feminist. So we took off on this incredible fantasy and made up an idea of what the ‘new woman’ would be and proceeded to almost destroy ourselves and each other trying to live up to our projection right now, immediately, here in the midst of the monster. We rejected the politics of guilt, but we used the tactic of guilt to push each other and ourselves to change. It was a lot of bullshit, because developing into women with revolutionized consciousness is a process, not an act or a decision. Moreover, it is ridiculous at this early point with so few women, relatively ,involved in it, to pretend that we could set up a model so soon. I mean we come to the women’s movement is pretty demented fucked-up distorted personalities. That’s what oppression does to you. Light, macho and monagamy are the two best examples I can think of. ‘Macho’ and ‘monogamy’ are hard to define in the way that the women’s movement uses them. But generally when you’re called ‘macho’, they’re trying to say that you’re acting butch, that you’re playing at being a man, that you’re aggressive. Mostly when you’re being called macho as an attack they mean that you’re generally acting like some male stud. (Macho’ comes from the Latin word machismo which basically means male chauvinist pig.) ‘Monogamy’ is a word used in a million different ways. It usually refers to two people who are lovers, and who may be into each other to the point of exclusion of others. In heterosexual monogamy, the woman is usually dependent on her man and lives through him, instead of with him. A lot of women in the women’s movement criticize macho women a lot, and spend a lot of energy avoiding ‘taking on the characteristics of men.’ They [fell] that macho intimidates and alienates other women. But it seems to me that growing up female and gay in Amerika is what intimidates and alienates women and makes us afraid of strengths of any sort. But just rejecting macho as inherently bad, as a rule we set up, doesn’t deal with the real problem which is that men have always used strength against us, against all oppressed peoples, and it is the misuse of strength which leads to domination, not the existence or style of strength. I don’t worry about macho in women.. in fact I encourage it… because I feel the thing we have to worry about the most is how we are all going to get out of the behavior and gestures of feminity; how we’re going to stop seeing ourselves as weak and passive. Women who are trying to be strong and tough have a rough time of it, because we don’t have any forms to be that in. There are a bunch of characteristics that exist in people. In sexist society, some of those characteristics are called feminine (gentleness, delicacy, sweetness, supportiveness, emotion, etc.) Some of them are called masculine (strength, power, aggression, arrogance, technical competency, achievement, etc.) Now the problem with sexism isn’t that men have technical competence and physical prowess: the problem is that ONLY men can legimately have these characteristics, and that their skills and aptitudes are used against women and therefore become perverted. Technology, like physical strength, is not inherently bad, It’s the oppressive applications that reek. In the hands of the right people (oppressed people) almost all competencies can become constructive energy sources. So if we in the women’s movement reject as ‘male’ every characteristic assigned to men by pig society, then we’re accepting their sexist categories and I don’t understand how we intend to win our war. If women start strutting around (instead of swishing about) and start wearing leather jackets (instead of dainty cloth coats) and chewing on toothpicks and swearing alot and getting into fights (instead of sitting at home polishing our toenails) well that doesn’t seem to me such a crisis. I’m worried about our tendencies to be submissive and to eat more shit than is good for our souls, to subordinate our struggle to other struggles out of guilt, to be wimpy and scared and paralyzed. Once it is not a dramatic act to walk down the street holding hands with our girlfriends, once rejecting rape-minded advances isn’t guerrilla theatre, once wanting to be a plumber isn’t ‘cute’.. then we may be free enough to develop whole new ways of being strong. I don’t understand what feminists mean when they say we should totally reject role-playing. I don’t understand what I would do, how I would act, if I didn’t role-play. It’s not like we’re so free, our vibes are so clear, and we are so unfettered that there is some ‘natural’ way of being. One makes decisions about one’s behavior every time she acts in any way. Like when I stopped wearing makeup and miniskirts, and I wondered how I should dress, feminists told me to just dress with whatever was at hand and was practical. Now that is ridiculous. I have to go out and rip off or buy anything that might just ‘be at hand’..clothes don’t spring into my drawers on their own. The thing I actually had to do, was pick a new role, a new set of behavior patterns. And I think it’s real cool for women to experiment with all sorts of roles in all sorts of mannerisms until something really does click and feels natural. It’s the same with defenses. Feminists are always talking about breaking down defenses. Well that seems to me to be suicidal. We’re living in this evil jungle where the last thing I plan to be is defenseless. The women’s movement should help us develop BETTER defenses it seems to me. It should help us develop more control over our defenses, so that we are able to let them down when we’re sure it’s safe. But who the fuck can win a war without self-defense on every level. I will not give up my aggressiveness and my macho because I want to survive until the time that they become irrelevant to my happiness. Then there’s another piece of dogma that a lot of us dragged with us from the straight woman’s movement. Smash monogamy. In the very beginning of the Page 10 Volume 1 Number 17 Ain’t I
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