Adrienne Rich
Source: http://www.terry.uga.edu/~dawndba/4500compulsoryhet.htm
Adrienne Rich's essay constitutes a powerful
challenge to some of our least examined sexual assumptions. Rich turns all the
familiar arguments on their heads: If the first erotic bond is to the mother,
she asks, could not the "natural" sexual orientation of both men and
women be toward women?
Rich's radical questioning has been a major
intellectual force in the general feminist reorientation to sexual matters in
recent years, and her conception of a "lesbian continuum"
sparked especially intense debate. Does lesbianism incorporate all support
systems and intense interactions among women, or is it a specifically erotic
choice? What is gained and what is lost with the second, narrower definition?
Rich's assumptions also usefully raise the more general theoretical question:
Is adult sexuality so closely associated with the infant bond that genuinely
satisfying sex relations are likely to be structured primarily around
nurturance?
I
Biologically men have only one innate orientation--a sexual one
that draws them to women--while women have two innate orientations, sexual
toward men and reproductive toward their young.(1)
I was a woman terribly vulnerable, critical using femaleness as a
sort of standard of yardstick to measure and discard men. Yes--something like
that. I was an Anna who invited defeat from men without ever being conscious of
it. (But I am conscious of it. And being conscious of it means I shall leave it
all behind me and become--but what?) I was stuck fast in an emotion common to
women of our time, that can turn them bitter, or Lesbian, or solitary. Yes,
that Anna during that time was . . .
The bias of compulsory heterosexuality, through which lesbian
experience is perceived on a scale ranging from deviant to abhorrent, or simply
rendered invisible, could be illustrated from many other texts than the two
just preceding. The assumption made by Rossi, that women are "innately
sexually oriented" toward men, or by Lessing, that the lesbian choice
is simply an acting-out of bitterness toward men, are by no means theirs alone;
they are widely current in literature and in the social sciences.
I am concerned here with two other matters as well: first, how and
why women's choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners co-workers,
lovers, tribe, has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding and disguise;
and second, the virtual or total neglect of lesbian existence in a wide range
of writings, Including feminist scholarship. Obviously there is a connection
here. I believe that much feminist theory and criticism is stranded on this
shoal.
My organizing impulse is the belief that it is not enough for
feminist thought that specifically lesbian texts exist. Any theory or
cultural/political creation that treats lesbian existence as a marginal or less
"natural" phenomenon, as mere "sexual preference," or as
the mirror image of either heterosexual or male homosexual relations is
profoundly weakened thereby, whatever its other contributions. Feminist theory
can no longer afford merely to voice a toleration of "lesbianism" as
an "alternative life-style," or make token allusion to lesbians. A
feminist critique of compulsory heterosexual orientation for women is long
overdue. In this exploratory paper, I shall try to show why.
I will begin by way of examples, briefly discussing four books
that have appeared in the last few years, written from different viewpoints and
political orientations, but all presenting themselves, and favorably
reviewed, as feminist.(3) All take as a basic assumption
that the social relations of the sexes are disordered and extremely
problematic, if not disabling, for women; all seek paths toward change. I have
learned more from some of these books than from others; but on this I am clear:
each one might have been more accurate, more powerful, more truly a force for
change, had the author felt impelled to deal with lesbian existence as a
reality, and as a source of knowledge and power available to women; or with the
institution of heterosexuality itself as a beachhead of male dominance.(4) In none of them is the question
ever raised, whether in a different context, or other things being equal, women
would choose heterosexual coupling and marriage; heterosexuality is
presumed as a "sexual preference" of most women," either
implicitly or explicitly. In none of these books, which concern themselves with
mothering, sex roles, relationships, and societal prescriptions for women, is
compulsory heterosexuality ever examined as an institution powerfully affecting
all these; or the idea of "preference" or "innate
orientation" even indirectly questioned.
In For Her Own Good 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to
Women by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, the
authors' superb pamphlets, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of
Women Healers, and Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual
Politics of Sickness, are developed into a provocative and complex
study Their thesis in this book is that the advice given American women by male
health professionals, particularly in the areas of marital sex, maternity, and
child care, has echoed the dictates of the economic marketplace and the role
capitalism has needed women to play in production and/ or reproduction. Women
have become the consumer victims of various cures, therapies, and normative
judgments in different periods (including the prescription to middle-class
women to embody and preserve the sacredness of the home--the
"scientific" romanticization) of the home itself). None of the
"experts' " advice has been either particularly scientific or
women-oriented; it has reflected male needs, male fantasies about women, and
male interest in controlling women--particularly in the realms of sexuality and
motherhood--fused with the requirements of industrial capitalism. So much of
this book is so devastatingly informative and is written with such lucid
feminist wit that I kept waiting as I read for the basic prescription against
lesbianism to he examined It never was.
This can hardly be for lack of information. Jonathan Katz's Gay
American History(5) tells us that as early as
1656 the New Haven Colony prescribed the death penalty for lesbians. Katz
provides many suggestive and informative documents on the "treatment"
(or torture) of lesbians by the medical profession in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Recent work by the historian Nancy Sahli documents the
crackdown on intense female friendships among college women at the turn of the
present century(6) The ironic title For Her
Own Good might have referred first and foremost to the economic
imperative to heterosexuality and marriage and to the sanctions imposed against
single women and widows--both of whom have been and still are viewed as deviant
Yet, in this often enlightening Marxist-feminist overview of male prescriptions
for female sanity and health, the economics of prescriptive heterosexuality go
unexamined.(7)
Of the three psychoanalytically based books, one, Jean Baker
Miller's Toward a New Psychology, of Women, is written as if
Lesbians simply do not exist, even as marginal beings Given Miller's title I
find this astonishing. However, the favorable reviews the book has
received in feminist journals, including Signs and Spokeswoman, suggest
that Miller's heterocentric assumptions are widely shared In The
Mermaid and the Minotaur Sexual Arrangements and the Human Malaise, Dorothy Dinnerstein makes
an impassioned argument for the sharing of parenting between women and men and
for an end to what she perceives as the male/female symbiosis of "gender
arrangements," which she feels are leading the species further and further
into violence and self-extinction. Apart from other problems that I have with
this book (including her silence on the institutional and random terrorism men
have practiced on women--and children--throughout history, amply documented by
Barry, Daly, Griffin, Russell and van deVen, and Brownmiller, (8) and her obsession with
psychology to the neglect of economic and other material realities that help to
create psychological reality), I find utterly a historical Dinnerstein's view
of the relations between women and men as "a collaboration to keep history
mad" She means by this, to perpetuate social relations that are hostile,
exploitative, and destructive to life itself. She sees women and
men as equal partners in the making of "sexual arrangements,"
seemingly unaware of the repeated struggles of women to resist oppression (our
own and that of others) and to change our condition. She ignores, specifically,
the history of women who as witches, femmes seules, marriage
resisters, spinsters, autonomous widows, and/or lesbians--have managed on
varying levels not to collaborate. It is this history, precisely, from which
feminists have so much to learn and on which there is overall such blanketing
silence. Dinnerstein acknowledges at the end of her book that
"female separatism," though "not on a large scale and in the
long run wildly impractical," has something to teach us: "Separate,
women could in principle set out to learn from scratch--undeflected by the
opportunities to evade this task that men's presence has so far offered--what
intact self-creative humanness is."(9) Phrases like "intact
self-creative humanness'' obscure the question of what the many forms of female
separatism have actually been addressing. The fact is that women in every
culture and throughout history have undertaken the task of
independent, nonheterosexual, woman-connected existence, to the extent
made possible by their context, often in the belief that they were the
"only ones" ever to have done so. They have undertaken it even though
few women have been in an economic position to resist marriage altogether; and
even though attacks against unmarried women have ranged from aspersion and
mockery to deliberate gynocide, including the burning and torturing of
millions of widows and spinsters during the witch persecutions of the
fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in Europe, and the practice of
suttee on widows in India.(10)
Nancy Chodorow does come close to the edge of an
acknowledgment of lesbian existence. Like Dinnerstein, Chodorow believes
that the fact that women, and women only, are responsible for child care in the
sexual division of labor has led to an entire social organization of gender
inequality, and that men as well as women must become primary carers for
children if that inequality is to change In the process of examining, from a
psychoanalytic perspective, how mothering-by-women affects the psychological
development of girl and boy children, she offers documentation that men are
"emotionally secondary" in women's lives; that "women have a
richer, ongoing inner world to fall back on . . . men do not become as
emotionally important to women as women do to men "(11) This would carry into the
late twentieth century Smith-Rosenberg's findings about eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century women's emotional focus on women. "Emotionally
important" can of course refer to anger as well as to love, or to that intense
mixture of the two often found in women's relationships with women: one aspect
of what I have come to call the "double-life of women" (see below). Chodorow concludes
that because women have women as mothers, "The mother remains a primary
internal object [sic] to the girl, so that heterosexual
relationships are on the model of a nonexclusive, second relationship for her,
whereas for the boy they recreate an exclusive, primary relationship "
According to Chodorow, women "have learned to deny the limitations of
masculine lovers for both psychological and practical reasons.(12)
But the practical reasons (like witch burnings; male control of
law, theology, and science; or economic nonviability within the
sexual division of labor) are glossed over Chodorow's account barely
glances at the constraints and sanctions that, historically, have enforced or
ensured the coupling of women with men and obstructed or penalized our coupling
or allying in independent groups with other women. She dismisses lesbian
existence with the comment that "lesbian relationships do tend to recreate
mother-daughter emotions and connections, but most women are heterosexual"
(implied more mature, having developed beyond the mother-daughter connection).
She then adds: "This heterosexual preference and taboos on homosexuality,
in addition to objective economic dependence on men, make the option of primary
sexual bonds with other women unlikely--though more prevalent in recent years."(13) The significance of that
qualification seems irresistible--but Chodorow does not explore it
further. Is she saying that lesbian existence has become more visible in recent
years (in certain groups?), that economic and other pressures have changed
(under capitalism, socialism, or both?), and that consequently more women are
rejecting the heterosexual "choice"? She argues that women want
children because their heterosexual relationships lack richness and intensity,
that in having a child a woman seeks to recreate her own intense relationship
with her mother. It seems to be that on the basis of her own findings, Chodorow leads
us implicitly to conclude that heterosexuality is not a "preference"
for women; that, for one thing, it fragments the erotic from the emotional in a
way that women find impoverishing and painful. Yet her book participates in
mandating it. Neglecting the covert socializations and the overt forces that
have channeled women into marriage and heterosexual romance pressures ranging
from the selling of daughters to postindustrial economics to the silences of
literature to the images of the television screen, she, likeDinnerstein, is
stuck with trying to reform a manmade institution--compulsory
heterosexuality--as if, despite profound emotional impulses and
complementarities drawing women toward women, there is a mystical/biological
heterosexual inclination, a "preference" or "choice" that
draws women toward men
Moreover, it is understood that this "preference" does
not need to be explained, unless through the tortuous theory of the female
Oedipus complex or the necessity for species reproduction. It is lesbian
sexuality that (usually, and, incorrectly, "included" under male
homosexuality) is seen as requiring explanation. This assumption of female
heterosexuality seems to me in itself remarkable: it is an enormous assumption
to have glided so silently into the foundations of our thought.
The extension of this assumption is the frequently heard assertion
that in a world of genuine equality, where men were nonoppressive and
nurturing, everyone would be bisexual. Such a notion blurs and sentimentalizes
the actualities within which women have experienced sexuality; it is the old
liberal leap across the tasks and struggles of here and now, the continuing
process of sexual definition that will generate its own possibilities and
choices. (It also assumes that women who have chosen women have done so simply
because men are oppressive and emotionally unavailable: which still fails to
account for women who continue to pursue relationships with oppressive and/or
emotionally unsatisfying men.) I am suggesting that heterosexuality, like
mother-hood, needs to be recognized and studied as a political
institution--even, or especially, by those individuals who feel they are,
in their personal experience, the precursors of a new social relation between
the sexes.
II
If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical
nurture for both female and male children, it would seem logical, from a
feminist perspective at least, to pose the following questions: whether the
search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward
women; why in fact women would ever redirect that search; why
species-survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships
should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other; and why such
violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women's total
emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men. I doubt that enough feminist
scholars and theorists have taken the pains to acknowledge the societal forces
that wrench women's emotional and erotic energies away from themselves and
other women and from woman- identified values. These forces, as I shall try to
show, range from literal physical enslavement to the disguising and distorting
of possible options.
I do not, myself, assume that mothering-by-women is a
"sufficient cause" of lesbian existence. But the issue of
mothering-by-women has been much in the air of late, usually accompanied by the
view that increased parenting by men would minimize antagonism between the
sexes and equalize the sexual imbalance of power of males over females. These
discussions are carried on without reference to compulsory heterosexuality as a
phenomenon let alone as an ideology. I do not wish to psychologize here,
but rather to identify sources of male power I believe large numbers of men
could, in fact, undertake child care on a large scale without radically
altering the balance of male power in a male-identified society.
In her essay "The Origin of the Family,'' Kathleen Gough
lists eight characteristics of male power in archaic and contemporary societies
that I would like to use as a framework "men's ability to deny women
sexuality or to force it upon them; to command or exploit their labor to
control their produce; to control or rob them of their children; to confine
them physically and prevent their movement; to use them as objects in male
transactions; to cramp their creativeness; or to withhold from them large areas
of the society's knowledge and cultural attainments."(14) (Gough does not perceive these
power-characteristics as specifically enforcing heterosexuality; only as
producing sexual inequality ) Below, Gough's words appear in italics;
the elaboration of each of her categories, in brackets, is my own.
Characteristics of male power include the power of men:
1. to deny women [our own] sexuality
[by means of clitoridectomy and infibulation;
chastity belts; punishment, including death, for female adultery; punishment,
including death, for lesbian sexuality; psychoanalytic denial of the clitoris;
strictures against masturbation; denial of material and postmenopausal
sensuality; unnecessary hysterectomy; pseudolesbian images in media
and literature; closing of archives and destruction of documents relating to
lesbian existence];
2. or to force it [male sexuality] upon them
by means of rape (including marital rape) and wife beating;
father-daughter, brother-sister incest; the socialization of women to feel that
male sexual "drive" amounts to a right,(15) idealization of
heterosexual romance in art, literature, media, advertising, and so
forth; child marriage; arranged marriage; prostitution; the harem;
psychoanalytic doctrines of frigidity and vaginal orgasm; pornographic
depictions of women responding pleasurably to sexual violence and humiliation
(a subliminal message being that sadistic heterosexuality is more
"normal" than sensuality between women)];
3. to command or exploit their labor to control their
produce
[by means of the institutions of marriage and motherhood as unpaid
production; the horizontal segregation of women in paid employment; the decoy
of the upwardly mobile token woman; male control of abortion, contraception,
and childbirth; enforced sterilization; pimping, female infanticide, which robs
mothers of daughters and contributes to generalized devaluation of women];
4. to control or rob them of their children
[by means of father-right and "legal kidnapping";(16) enforced sterilization;
systematized infanticide; seizure of children from lesbian mothers by the
courts, the malpractice of male obstetrics; use of the mother as "token
torturer"(17) in genital mutilation or
in binding the daughter's feet (or mind) to fit her for marriage];
5. to confine them physically and prevent their
movement
[by means of rape as terrorism, keeping women off the streets; purdah,
foot-binding; atrophying of women's athletic capabilities; haute couture,
"feminine" dress codes; the veil; sexual harassment on the streets,
horizontal segregation of women in employment; prescriptions for
"full-time" mothering; enforced economic dependence of wives];
6. to use them as objects in male transactions
[use of women as "gifts," bride-price; pimping; arranged
marriage; use of women as entertainers to facilitate male deals, for example,
wife-hostess, cocktail waitress required to dress for male sexual titillation,
call girls, "bunnies," geisha, kisaeng prostitutes,
secretaries];
7. to cramp their creativeness
[witch persecutions as campaigns against midwives and female
healers and as pogrom against independent, "unassimilated" women;(18) definition of male
pursuits as more valuable than female within any culture, so that cultural
values become embodiment of male subjectivity, restriction of female
self-fulfillment to marriage and motherhood, sexual exploitation of women by
male artists and teachers; the social and economic disruption of women's
creative aspirations;(19) erasure of female
tradition];(20) and
8. to withhold from them large areas of the society's
knowledge and cultural attainments
[by means of noneducation of females (60 percent of
the world's illiterates are women~; the "Great Silence" regarding
women and particularly lesbian existence in history and culture;(21) sex-role stereotyping
that deflects women from science, technology, and other "masculine"
pursuits; male social/professional bonding that excludes women; discrimination
against women in the professions]
These are some of the methods by which male power is manifested and
maintained. Looking at the schema, what surely impresses itself is the fact
that we are confronting not a simple maintenance of inequality and property
possession, but a pervasive cluster of forces, ranging from physical brutality
to control of consciousness, that suggests that an enormous
potential counterforce is having to be restrained.
Some of the forms by which male power manifests itself are
more easily recognizable as enforcing heterosexuality on women than are others.
Yet each one I have listed adds to the cluster of forces within which women
have been convinced that marriage and sexual orientation toward men are
inevitable, even if unsatisfying or oppressive components of their lives. The
chastity belt; child marriage; erasure of lesbian existence (except as exotic
and perverse) in art, literature, film; idealization of heterosexual romance
and marriage--these are some fairly obvious forms of compulsion, the first two
exemplifying physical force, the second two control of consciousness. While clitoridectomy has
been assailed by feminists as a form of woman-torture,(22) Kathleen Barry first pointed
out that it is not simply a way of turning the young girl into a "marriageable"
woman through brutal surgery; it intends that women in the intimate proximity
of polygynous marriage will not form sexual relationships with each
other; that--from a male,genitalfetishist perspective--female erotic
connections, even in a sex segregated situation, will be literally excised.(23)
The function of pornography as an influence on consciousness is a
major public issue of our time, when a multibillion-dollar industry has the
power to disseminate increasingly sadistic, women-degrading visual images But
even so-called soft-core pornography and advertising depict women as objects of
sexual appetite devoid of emotional context, without individual meaning or personality:
essentially as a sexual commodity to be consumed by males. (So-called lesbian
pornography, created for the male voyeuristic eye, is equally devoid of
emotional context or individual personality.) The most pernicious message
relayed by pornography is that women are natural sexual prey to men and love
it; that sexuality and violence are congruent; and that for women sex is
essentially masochistic, humiliation pleasurable, physical abuse erotic. But
along with this message comes another, not always recognized that enforced
submission and the use of cruelty, if played out in heterosexual pairing, is
sexually "normal," while sensuality between women, including erotic
mutuality and respect, is "queer," "sick," and either pornographic
in itself or not very exciting compared with the sexuality of whips and
bondage.(24) Pornography does not simply
create a climate in which sex and violence are interchangeable, it widens
the range of behavior considered acceptable from men in heterosexual
intercourse--behavior that reiteratively strips women of their autonomy,
dignity, and sexual potential, including the potential of loving and being
loved by women in mutuality and integrity.
In her brilliant study Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case
of Sex Discrimination, Catharine A. MacKinnon delineates the
intersection of compulsory heterosexuality and economics. Under capitalism,
women are horizontally segregated by gender and occupy a structurally inferior
position in the workplace; this is hardly news, but MacKinnon raises
the question why, even if capitalism "requires some collection of
individuals to occupy low-status, low-paying positions such persons must be
biologically female," and goes on to point out that "the fact that
male employers often do not hire qualified women, even when they could
pay them less than men suggests that more than the profit motive is
implicated" (emphasis added).(25) She cites a wealth of material
documenting the fact that women are not only segregated in low-paying service
jobs (as secretaries, domestics, nurses, typists, telephone operators,
child-care workers, waitresses) but that "sexualization of the
woman" is part of the job. Central and intrinsic to the economic realities
of women's lives is the requirement that women will "market sexual
attractiveness to men, who tend to hold the economic power and position to
enforce their predilections." And MacKinnon exhaustively
documents that "sexual harassment perpetuates the interlocked structure by
which women have been kept sexually in thrall to men at the bottom of the labor
market. Two forces of American society converge: men's control over women's
sexuality and capital's control over employees' work lives."(26) Thus, women in the
workplace are at the mercy of sex-as-power in a vicious circle. Economically
disadvantaged, women--whether waitresses or professors--endure sexual
harassment to keep their jobs and learn to behave in a complaisantly and
ingratiatingly heterosexual manner because they discover this is their true
qualification for employment, whatever the job description. And, MacKinnon notes,
the woman who too decisively resists sexual overtures in the workplace is
accused of being "dried-up" and sexless, or lesbian. This raises a
specific difference between the experiences of lesbians and homosexual men. A
lesbian, closeted on her job because of heterosexist prejudice, is not simply
forced into denying the truth of her outside relationships or private life; her
job depends on her pretending to be not merely heterosexual but a heterosexual woman, in
terms of dressing and playing the feminine, deferential role required of
"real" women.
MacKinnon raises radical questions as to the qualitative
differences between sexual harassment, rape, and ordinary heterosexual
intercourse. ("As one accused rapist put it, he hadn't used 'any more
force than is usual for males during the preliminaries.'") She criticizes
Susan Brownmiller(27) for separating rape from
the mainstream of daily life and for her unexamined premise that "rape is
violence, intercourse is sexually," removing rape from the sexual sphere
altogether. Most crucially she argues that "taking rape from the realm of
'the sexual,' placing it in the realm of 'the violent,' allows one to be
against it without raising any questions about the extent to which the
institution of heterosexuality has defined force as a normal part of 'the
preliminaries."(28) Never is it asked
whether, under conditions of male supremacy, the notion of 'consent' has any
meaning."(29)
The fact is that the workplace, among other social institutions,
is a place where women have learned to accept male violation of our psychic and
physical boundaries as the price of survival; where women have been educated -
no less than by romantic literature or by pornography - to perceive ourselves
as sexual prey. a woman seeking to escape such casual violations along with
economic disadvantage may well turn to marriage as a form of hoped-for
protection, while bringing into marriage neither social nor economic power,
thus entering that institution also from a disadvantaged position. MacKinnon finally
asks:
What if inequality is built into the social
conceptions of male and female sexuality, of masculinity and femininity, of
sexiness and heterosexual attractiveness? Incidents of sexual harassment
suggest that male sexual desire itself may be aroused by female vulnerability.
. . . Men feel they can take advantage, so they want to, so they do.
Examination of sexual harassment, precisely because the episodes appear commonplace,
forces one to confront the fact that sexual intercourse normally occurs between
economic (as well as physical) unequals . . . the apparent legal
requirement that violations of women's sexuality appear out of the ordinary
before they will be punished helps prevent women from defining the ordinary
conditions of their own consent.(30)
Given the nature and extent of heterosexual pressures, the daily
"eroticization of women's subordination" as MacKinnon phrases
it,(31) I question the more or less
psychoanalytic perspective (suggested by such writers as Karen Horney, II.
R. Hayes, Wolfgang Lederer, and most recently, Dorothy Dinnerstein)
that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male
"fear of women" and of women's sexual instatiability. It seems
more probable that men really fear, not that they will have women's sexual
appetites forced on them, or that women want to smother and devour them, but
that women could be indifferent to them altogether, that men could be allowed
sexual and emotional - therefore economic - access to women only on
women's terms, otherwise being left on the periphery of the matrix.
The means of assuring male sexual access to women have recently
received a searching investigation by Kathleen Barry.(32) She documents extensive
and appalling evidence for the existence, on a very large scale, of
international female slavery, the institution once known as "white
slavery" but that in fact has involved, and at this very moment involves,
women of every race and class. In the theoretical analysis derived from her
research, Barry makes the connection between all enforced conditions under
which women live subject to men prostitution, marital rape, father-daughter and
brother-sister incest, wife-beating, pornography, bride-price, the selling
of daughters, purdah, and genital mutilation. She sees the rape
paradigm--where the victim of sexual assault is held responsible for her own
victimization--as leading to the rationalization and acceptance of other forms
of enslavement where the woman is presumed to have "chosen" her fate,
to embrace it passively, or to have courted it perversely through rash or
unchaste behavior. On the contrary, Barry maintains, "female sexual
slavery is present in ALL situations where women or girls cannot
change the conditions of their existence; where regardless of how they got into
those conditions, e g., social pressure, economic hardship, misplaced trust or
the longing for affection, they cannot get out; and where they are subject to sexual
violence and exploitation."(33) She provides a spectrum
of concrete examples, not only as to the existence of a widespread
international traffic in women, but also as to how this operates--whether in
the form of a "Minnesota pipeline" funneling blonde, blue eyed midwestern runaways
to Times Square, or the purchasing of young women out of rural poverty in Latin
America or Southeast Asia or the providing of maisons d'abattage for
migrant workers in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris Instead of
"blaming the victim" or trying to diagnose her presumed pathology,
Barry turns her floodlight on the pathology of sex colonization itself, the
ideology of "cultural sadism" represented by the vast industry of
pornography and by the overall identification of women primarily as
"sexual beings whose responsibility is the sexual service of men."(34)
Barry delineates what she names a "sexual domination
perspective" through whose lens, purporting objectivity, sexual abuse and
terrorism of women by men has been rendered almost invisible by treating it as
natural and inevitable. From its point of view, women are expendable as long as
the sexual and emotional needs of the male can be satisfied. To replace this
perspective of domination with a universal standard of basic freedom for women
from gender-specific violence, from constraints on movement, and from male
right of sexual and emotional access is the political purpose of her book. Like
Mary Daily inGyn/Ecology, Barry rejects structuralist and
other cultural-relativist rationalizations for sexual torture and anti-woman
violence. In her opening chapter, she asks of her readers that they refuse all
handy escapes into ignorance and denial. "The only way we can come out of
hiding, break through our paralyzing defenses, is to know it all--the full
extent of sexual violence and domination of women. . . Inknowing, in
facing directly, we can learn to chart our course out of this oppression, by
envisioning and creating a world which will preclude female sexual slavery
"(35)
"Until we name the practice, give conceptual definition and
form to it, illustrate its life over time and in space, those who are its most
obvious victims will also not be able to name it or define their
experience."(36)
But women are all, in different ways and to different degrees, its
victims; and part of the problem with naming and conceptualizing female sexual
slavery is, as Barry clearly sees, compulsory heterosexuality. Compulsory
heterosexuality simplifies the task of the procurer and pimp in worldwide
prostitution rings and "eros centers," while, in the privacy of
the home, it leads the daughter to "accept" incest/rape by her
father, the mother to deny that it is happening, the battered
wife to stay on with an abusive husband. "Befriending or love" is a
major tactic of the procurer whose job it is to turn the runaway or the
confused young girl over to the pimp for seasoning. The ideology of
heterosexual romance, beamed at her from childhood out of fairy tales,
television, films, advertising, popular songs, wedding pageantry, is a tool
ready to the procurer's hand and one he does not hesitate to use, as Barry
amply documents. Early female indoctrination in "love" as an emotion
may be largely a Western concept; but a more universal ideology concerns the
primacy and uncontrollability of the male sexual drive. This is one of many
insights offered by Barry's work:
As sexual power is learned by adolescent boys
through the social experience of their sex drive, so do girls learn that the
locus of sexual power is male. Given the importance placed on the male sex
drive in the socialization of girls as well as boys, early adolescence is
probably the first significant phase of male identification in a girl's life
and development . . . As a young girl becomes aware of her own increasing
sexual feelings … she turns away from her heretofore primary relationships with
girlfriends. As they become secondary to her, recede in importance in her life,
her own identity also assumes a secondary role and she grows into male
identification.(37)
We still need to ask why some women never, even temporarily
"turn away from heretofore primary relationships" with other females
And why does male-identification--the casting of one's social, political, and
intellectual allegiances with men--exist among lifelong sexual lesbians?
Barry's hypothesis throws us among new questions, but it clarifies the
diversity of forms in which compulsory heterosexuality presents itself In the
mystique of the overpowering, all-conquering male sex drive, the
penis-with-a-life-of-its-own, is rooted the law of male sex-right to women,
which justifies prostitution as a universal cultural assumption on the one
hand, while defending sexual slavery within the family on the basis of
"family privacy and cultural uniqueness" on the other.(38) The adolescent male sex
drive, which, as both young women and men are taught, once triggered cannot
take responsibility for itself or take no for an answer, becomes, according to
Barry, the norm and rationale for adult male sexual behavior a condition ofarrested
sexual development. Women learn to accept as natural the inevitability
of this "drive" because we receive it as dogma violence marital rape,
hence the Japanese wife resignedly packing her husband's suitcase for his
weekend in the kisaeng brothels of Taiwan, hence the
psychological as well as economic imbalance of power between husband and wife,
male employer and female worker, father and daughter, male professor and female
student.
The effect of male-identification means
internalizing the values of the colonizer
and actively participating in carrying out the colonization of one's self and
one's sex. . . Male identification is the act whereby women place men above
women, including themselves, in credibility, status, and importance in most
situations, regardless of the comparative quality the women may bring to the
situation.... Interaction with women is seen as a lesser form of relating on
every level.39
What deserves further exploration is the double-think many women
engage in and from which no woman is permanently and utterly free however
woman-to-woman relationships, female support networks, a female and feminist
value system, are relied on and cherished, indoctrination in male credibility
and status can still create synapses in thought, denials of feeling, wishful
thinking, a profound sexual and intellectual confusion.40 I
quote here from a letter I received the day I was writing this passage: "I
have had very bad relationships with men--I am now in the midst of a very
painful separation I am trying to find my strength through women--without my
friends, I could not survive." How many times a day do women speak words
like these, or think them, or write them, and how often does the synapse
reassert itself?
Barry summarizes her findings:
Considering the arrested sexual development that
is understood to be normal in the male population, and considering the numbers
of men who are pimps, procurers, members of slavery gangs, corrupt officials
participating in this traffic, owners, operators, employees of brothels and
lodging and entertainment facilities, pornography purveyors, associated with
prostitution, wife beaters, child molesters, incest perpetrators, johns
(tricks) and rapists, one cannot but be momentarily stunned by the enormous
male population engaging in female sexual slavery. 'I'he huge number of
men engaged in these practices should be cause for declaration of an
international emergency, a crisis in sexual violence. But what
should be cause for alarm is instead accepted as normal sexual intercourse.41
Susan Calvin, in her rich and provocative, if highly speculative,
dissertation, suggests that patriarchy becomes possible when the original
female band, which includes children but ejects adolescent males, becomes
invaded and outnumbered by males; that not patriarchal marriage, but the rape
of the mother by the son, becomes the first act of male domination The entering
wedge, or leverage, that allows this to happen is not just a simple change in
sex ratios; it is also the mother-child bond, manipulated by adolescent males
in order to remain within the matrix past the age of exclusion. Maternal
affection is used to establish male right of sexual access, which, however,
must ever after be held by force (or through control of consciousness) since
the original deep adult bonding is that of woman for woman.42 I find this hypothesis extremely suggestive, since one form
of false consciousness that serves compulsory heterosexuality is the
maintenance of a mother-son relationship between women and men, including the
demand that women provide maternal solace, nonjudgmental nurturing, and compassion
for their harassers, rapists, and batterers (as well as for men who
passively vampirize them) how many strong and assertive women accept
male posturing from no one but their sons?
But whatever its origins, when we look hard and clearly at the
extent and elaboration of measures designed to keep women within a male sexual
purlieu, it becomes an inescapable question whether the issue we have to
address as feminists is not simple "gender inequality," nor the
domination of culture by males, nor mere "taboos against
homosexuality," but the enforcement of heterosexuality for women as a
means of assuring male right of physical, economical, and emotional access.43 One of many
means of enforcement is, of course the rendering invisible of the lesbian
possibility, an engulfed continent that rises frequently to view from time to
time only to become submerged again. Feminist research and theory that
contributes to lesbian invisibility or marginality is actually working against
the liberation and empowerment of women as a group.44
The assumption that "most women are innately heterosexual''
stands as a theoretical and political stumbling block for many women. It
remains a tenable assumption, partly because lesbian existence has been written
out of history or catalogued under disease; partly because it has been treated
as exceptional rather than intrinsic; partly because to acknowledge that
for women heterosexuality may not be a "preference" at all but
something that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized
and maintained by force is an immense step to take if you consider yourself freely
and "innately" heterosexual. Yet the failure to examine
heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic
system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a
variety of forces, including both physical violence and false
consciousness. To take the step of questioning heterosexuality as a
''preference'' or "choice" for women--and to do the intellectual and
emotional work that follows--will call for a special quality of courage in
heterosexually identified feminists but I think the rewards will be great: a
freeing-up of thinking, the exploring of new paths, the shattering of another
great silence, new clarity in personal relationships.
III
I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuurn because
the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring Lesbian
existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of
lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence I mean
the term lesbian continuum to include a range--through each
woman's life and throughout history--of woman-identified experience; not simply
the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience
with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of
primary intensity between and among women,including the sharing of a rich
inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of
practical and political support; if we can also hear in it such associations as marriage
resistance and the "haggard" behavior identified by Mary
Daly (obsolete meanings "intractable," "willful,"
"wanton," and "unchaste" "a woman reluctant to yield
to wooing")45--we begin to grasp breadths of female history
and psychology that have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly
clinical, definitions of "lesbianism."
Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the
rejection of a compulsory way of life It is also a direct or indirect attack on
~male right of access to women But it is more than these, although we may first
begin to perceive it as a form of nay-saying to patriarchy, an act or
resistance It has of course included role playing, self-hatred, breakdown,
alcoholism, suicide, and intrawoman violence; we romanticize at our
peril what it means to love and act against the grain, and under heavy
penalties; and lesbian existence has been lived (unlike, say, Jewish or
Catholic existence) without access to any knowledge of a tradition, a
continuity, a social underpinning The destruction of records and memorabilia
and letters documenting the realities of lesbian existence must be taken very
seriously as a means of keeping heterosexuality compulsory for women, since
what has been kept from our knowledge is joy, sensuality, courage, and community,
as well as guilt, self-betrayal, and pain.46
Lesbians have historically been deprived of a political existence
through "inclusion" as female versions of male homosexuality. To
equate lesbian existence with male homosexuality because each is stigmatized is
to deny and erase female reality once again To separate those women stigmatized
as "homosexual" or "gay" from the complex continuum of
female resistance to enslavement, and attach them to a male pattern, is to
falsify our history Part of the history of lesbian existence is, obviously, to
be found where lesbians, lacking a coherent female community, have shared a
kind of social life and common cause with homosexual men But this has to be
seen against the differences women's lack of economic and cultural privilege
relative to men; qualitative differences in female and male relationships, for
example, the prevalence of anonymous sex and the justification of pederasty
among male homosexuals, the pronounced ageism in male homosexual standards of
sexual attractiveness, and so forth In defining and describing lesbian
existence I would hope to move toward a dissociation of lesbian from male
homosexual values and allegiances I perceive the lesbian experience as being,
like motherhood, a profoundly femaleexperience, with particular
oppressions, meanings, and potentialities we cannot comprehend as long as we
simply bracket it with other sexually stigmatized existences just as the term parenting serves
to conceal the particular and significant reality of being a parent who is
actually a mother, the term gay serves the purpose of blurring
the very outlines we need to discern, which are of crucial value for feminism
and for the freedom of women as a group.
As the term lesbian has been held to limiting, clinical associations
in its patriarchal definition, female friendship and comradeship have been set
apart from the erotic, thus limiting the erotic itself. But as we deepen and
broaden the range of what we define as lesbian existence as we delineate a
lesbian continuum, we begin to discover the erotic in female terms as that
which is unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body
itself, as an energy not only diffuse but, as Audre Lorde has
described it, omnipresent in "the sharing of joy, whether physical,
emotional, psychic," and in the sharing of work; as the empowering joy
which "makes us less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other
supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation,
despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial". In another
context, writing of women and work, I quoted the autobiographical passage in
which the poet H D described how her friend Bryher supported her in
persisting with the visionary experience that was to shape her mature work:
I knew that this experience, this
writing-on-the-wall before me, could not be shared with anyone except the girl
who stood so bravely there beside me. This girl had said without hesitation
"Go on." It was she really who had the detachment and integrity of
the Pythoness of Delphi But it was I, battered and dissociated …who
was seeing the pictures, and who was reading the writing or granted the inner
vision. Or perhaps, in some sense, we were “seeing" it together, for
without her, admittedly, I could not have gone on.48
If we consider the possibility that all women--from the infant
suckling her mother's breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic
sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother's
milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf's Chloe and
Olivia, who share a laboratory;49 to the woman dying
at ninety, touched and handled by women--exist on a lesbian continuum, we can
see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify
ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects of
woman-identification as diverse as the impudent, intimate girl-friendships of
eight- or nine-year-olds and the banding together of those women of the twelfth
and fifteenth centuries known as Beguines who "shared houses, rented to
one another, bequeathed houses to their room-mates . . . in cheap subdivided
houses in the artisans' area of town," who "practiced Christian
virtue on their own, dressing and living simply and not associating with
men," who earned their livings as spinners, bakers, nurses, or ran schools
for young girls, and who managed--until the Church forced them to disperse--to
live independent both of marriage and of conventual restrictions.50 It allows us to connect these women with the more celebrated
"Lesbians" of the women's school around Sappho of the
seventh century B.C.; with the secret sororities and economic networks reported
among African women; and with the Chinese marriage resistance
sisterhoods--communities of women who refused marriage, or who if married often
refused to consummate their marriages and soon left their husbands--the only
women in China who were not footbound and who, Agnes Smedley tells
us, welcomed the births of daughters and organized successful women's strikes
in the silk mills.51 It allows us to connect and compare
disparate individual instances of marriage resistance: for example, the type of
autonomy claimed by Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth-century white woman genius,
with the strategies available to Zora Neale Hurston, a twentieth-century
black woman genius. Dickinson never married, had tenuous
intellectual friendships with men, lived self-convented in her genteel
father's house, and wrote a lifetime of passionate letters to her sister-in-law
Sue Gilbert and a smaller group of such letters to her friend Kate Scott Anthon Hurston married
twice but soon left each husband, scrambled her way from Florida to Harlem to
Columbia University to Haiti and finally back to Florida, moved in and out of
white patronage and poverty, professional success and failure; her survival
relationships were all with women, beginning with her mother. Both of
these women in their vastly different circumstances were marriage resisters,
committed to their own work and selfhood, and were later characterized as
"apolitical " both were drawn to men of intellectual quality;
for both of them women provided the ongoing fascination and sustenance of life.
If we think of heterosexuality as the "natural"
emotional and sensual inclination for women, lives such as these are seen as
deviant, as pathological, or as emotionally and sensually deprived. Or,
in more recent and permissive jargon, they are banalized as
"life-styles." And the work of such women--whether merely the daily
work of individual or collective survival and resistance, or the
work of the writer, the activist, the reformer, the anthropologist, or the
artist--the work of self-creation--is undervalued, or seen as the bitter fruit
of "penis envy," or the sublimation of repressed eroticism, or the
meaningless rant of a"manhater." But when we turn the
lens of vision and consider the degree to which, and the methods
whereby, heterosexual "preference" has actually been imposed on
women, not only can we understand differently the meaning of individual lives
and work, but we can begin to recognize a central fact of women's history that
women have always resisted male tyranny A feminism of action, often, though not
always, without a theory, has constantly reemerged in every culture and in
every period We can then begin to study women's struggle against powerlessness,
women's radical rebellion, not just in male defined "concrete
revolutionary situations’"52 but in all the
situations male ideologies have not perceived as revolutionary for example, the
refusal of some women to produce children, aided at great risk by other women;
the refusal to produce a higher standard of living and leisure for men (Leghorn
and Parker show how both are part of women's unacknowledged, unpaid, and ununionized economic
contribution); that female antiphallic sexuality which, as Andrea Dworkin notes,
has been "legendary," which, defined as "frigidity" and
"puritanism,” has actually been a form of subversion of male
power--"an ineffectual rebellion, but . rebellion nonetheless."53 We can no longer have patience with Dinnerstein s
view that women have simply collaborated with men in the "sexual
arrangements" of history; we begin to observe behavior, both in history
and in individual biography, that has hitherto been invisible or misnamed;
behavior that often constitutes, given the limits of the counterforce exerted
in a given time and place, radical rebellion And we can connect these
rebellions and the necessity for them with the physical passion of woman for
woman that is central to lesbian existence the erotic sensuality that has been,
precisely, the most violently erased fact of female experience.
Heterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on
women, yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical
torture, imprisonment~ psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty
"Compulsory heterosexuality'' was named as one of the "crimes against
women by the Brussels Tribunal on Crimes against Women in 1976. Two
pieces of testimony, from women from two very different cultures, suggest the
degree to which persecution of lesbians is a global practice here and now. A
report from Norway relates:
A lesbian in Oslo was in a
heterosexual marriage that didn't work, so she started taking tranquilizers and
ended up at the health sanatorium for treatment and rehabilitation. . . . The
moment she said in family group therapy that she believed she was a lesbian the
doctor told her she was not he knew from "looking into her eyes," he
said. She had the eyes of a woman who wanted sexual intercourse with
her husband So she was subjected to so-called "couch
therapy." She was put into a comfortably heated room, naked, on
a cot and for an hour her husband was to. . . try to
excite her sexually. . . The idea was that the touching was always
to end with sexual intercourse. She felt stronger and stronger aversion. She
threw up and sometimes ran out of the room to avoid this "treatment."
The more strongly she asserted that she was a lesbian, the more violent the
forced heterosexual intercourse became. This treatment went on for about six
months. She escaped from the hospital, but she was brought back. Again she
escaped. She has not been there since. In the end she realized that she had
been subjected to forcible rape for six months.
(This, surely, is an example of female sexual slavery according to
Barry's definition). And from Mozambique:
I am condemned to a life of exile because I will
not deny that I am a lesbian, that my primary commitments are, and
will always be to other women. In the new Mozambique,
lesbianism is considered a left-over from colonialism and decadent Western
civilization. Lesbians are sent to rehabilitation camps to learn
through self criticism the correct line about themselves. . . . If I am
forced to denounce my own love for women, if I therefore denounce myself, I
could go back to Mozambique and join forces in the exciting and hard
struggles of rebuilding a nation, including the struggle for the emancipation
of Mozambiquan women. As it is, I either risk the rehabilitation
camps, or remain in exile.54
Nor can it be assumed that women like those in Carroll
Smith-Rosenberg's study, who married, stayed married, yet dwelt in a profoundly
female emotional and passionate world, "preferred" or
"chose" heterosexuality. Women have married because it was
necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who
would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to
remainrespectable, in order to do what was expected of women
because coming out of "abnormal" childhoods they wanted to feel
"normal," and because heterosexual romance has been represented as
the great female adventure, duty, and fulfillment. We may faithfully or
ambivalently have obeyed the institution, but our feelings--and our sensuality--have
not been tamed or contained within it. There is no statistical documentation of
the numbers of lesbians who have remained in heterosexual marriages for most of
their lives. But in a letter to the early lesbian publication Ladder, the
playwright Lorraine Hansberry had this to say:
I suspect that the problem of the married woman
who would prefer emotional-physical relationships with other women is
proportionally much higher than a similar statistic for men. (A statistic
surely no one will ever really have.) This because the estate of woman being
what it is, how could we ever begin to guess the numbers of women who are not
prepared to risk a life alien to what they have been taught all their lives to
believe was their "natural" destiny--AND--their only expectation for
ECONOMIC security. It seems to be that this is why the question has an
immensity that it does not have for male homosexuals.... A woman of strength
and honesty may, if she chooses, sever her marriage and marry a new male mate
and society will be upset that the divorce rate is rising so--but
there are few places in the United States, in any event, where she will be
anything remotely akin to an "outcast.' Obviously this is not true for a
woman who would end her marriage to take up life with another woman.55
This double-life--this apparent acquiescence to an
institution founded on male interest and prerogative--has been characteristic
of female experience: in motherhood, and in many kinds of heterosexual
behavior, including the rituals of courtship; the pretense of asexuality by the
nineteenth-century wife; the simulation of orgasm by the prostitute, the
courtesan, the twentieth-century "sexually liberated" woman.
Meridel LeSueur's documentary novel of the Depression, The Girl,
is arresting as a study of female double-life. The protagonist, a waitress in a Saint
Paul working-class speakeasy, feels herself passionately attracted to the
young man Butch, but her survival relationships are with Clara, an older
waitress and prostitute, with Belle, whose husband owns the bar, and with
Amelia, a union activist. For Clara and Belle and the unnamed protagonist, sex
with men is in one sense an escape from the bedrock misery of daily life; a
flare of intensity in the grey, relentless, often brutal web of day-to-day
existence:
It was like he was a magnet pulling me. It was
exciting and powerful and frightening. He was after me too and when he found me
I would run, or be petrified, just standing in front of him like a ~any. And he
told me not to be wandering with Clara to the Marigold where we danced with
strangers. He said he would knock the shit out of me. Which made me shake and
tremble, but it was better than being a husk full of suffering and not
knowing why.56
Throughout the novel the theme of double-life emerges; Belle
reminisces of her marriage to the bootlegger Hoinck:
You know, when I had that black eye and said I
hit it on the cupboard, well he did it the bastard, and then he says don't tell
anybody.... He's nuts, that's what he is, nuts, and I don't see why I live with
him, why I put up with him a minute on this earth. But listen kid, she said,
I'm telling you something. She looked at me and her face was wonderful. She
said, Jesus Christ, Goddam him I love him that's why I'm hooked like
this all my life, Goddam him I love him.57
After the protagonist has her first sex with Butch, her women
friends care for her bleeding, give her whiskey, and compare notes.
My luck, the first time and I got into trouble,
he gave me a little money and I come to St. Paul where for ten bucks they'd
stick a huge vet's needle into you and you start it and then you were on your
own.... I never had no child. I've just had Hoinck to mother, and a
hell of a child he is.58
Later they made me go back to Clara's room to
lie down.... Clara lay down beside me and put her arms around me and wanted me
to tell her about it but she wanted to tell about herself. She said she started
it when she was twelve with a bunch of boys in an old shed. She said nobody had
paid any attention to her before and she became very popular.... They like it
so much, she said, why shouldn't you give it to them and get presents and
attention? I never cared anything for it and neither did my mama. But it's the
only thing you got that's valuable.59
Sex is thus equated with attention from the male, who is
charismatic though brutal, infantile, or unreliable. Yet it is the women who
make life endurable for each other, give physical affection without causing
pain, share, advise, and stick by each other. (I am trying to find my
strength through women--without my friends, I could not survive.) LeSueur's The
Girl parallels Toni Morrison's remarkable Sula,another
revelation of female double-life: Nel was the one person who
had wanted nothing from her, who had accepted all aspects of her.... Nel was
one of the reasons [Sula] had drifted back to Medallion.... The men ... had
merged into one large personality: the same language of love, the same
entertainments of love, the same cooling of love. Whenever she introduced her
private thoughts into their rubbings and goings, they hooded their eyes. They taught
her nothing but love tricks, shared nothing but worry, gave nothing but money.
She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to
discover that a lover was not a comrade and would never be--for a woman. But Sula's last
thought at the second of her death is, "Wait'll I tell Nel."
And after Sula's death, Nel looks back on her own
life: "All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing
Jude." And the loss pressed down on her chest and come up into her throat.
"We was girls together," she said as though explaining something.
"O Lord, Sula," she cried, "Girl, girl, girlgirlgirl!"
It was a fine cry--loud and long--but it had no bottom and it had no top, just
circles and circles of sorrow.60
The Girl and Sula are both novels that reveal the lesbian
continuum in contrast to the shallow or sensational "lesbian scenes"
in recent commercial fiction.61 Each shows us
woman-identification untarnished (till the end of I,eSueur's novel)
by romanticism; each depicts the competition of heterosexual compulsion for
women's attention the diffusion and frustration of female bonding that might,
in a more conscious form, reintegrate love with power.
IV
Woman-identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead
of female power, violently curtailed and wasted under the institution of
heterosexuality. The denial of reality and visibility to women's passion for
women, women's choice of women as allies, life companions~ and community; the
forcing of such relationships into dissimulation and their disintegration under
intense pressure, have meant an incalculable loss to the power of all women to
change the social relations of the sexes to liberate ourselves and each other. The
lie of compulsory female heterosexuality today admits not just feminist
scholarship, but every profession, every reference work, every curriculum,
every organizing attempt, every relationship or conversation over which it
hovers. It creates, specifically, a profound falseness, hypocrisy, and hysteria
in the heterosexual dialogue, for every heterosexual relationship is lived in
the queasy strobelight of that lie. I however we choose to identify
ourselves, however we find ourselves labeled, it flickers across and distorts
our lives.62
The lie keeps numberless women psychologically trapped, trying to
fit mind, spirit, and sexuality into a prescribed script because they cannot
look beyond the parameters of the acceptable. It pulls on the energy of such
women even as it drains the energy of "closeted" lesbians--the energy
exhausted in the double-lire. The lesbian trapped in the
"closet," the woman imprisoned in prescriptive ideas of the
"normal," share the pain of blocked options, broken connections,
lost access to self-definition freely and powerfully assumed.
The lie is many-layered. In Western tradition,
one layer--the romantic--asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and
tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e g, Tristan undIsolde, Kate
Chopin’s The Awakening) it is still an organic
imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that
primary love between the sexes is “normal,” that women need men
as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological
completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social
unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to
men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more
devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as
women. Small wonder that lesbians are reported to be a more hidden
population than male homosexuals. The black lesbian/feminist critic, I,orraine Bethel,
writing on Zora Neale Hurston, remarks that for a black
woman--already twice an outsider--to choose to assume still another "hated
identity" is problematic indeed. Yet the lesbian continuum has
been a lifeline for black women both in Africa and the United
States.
Black women have a long tradition of bonding
together in a Black/women's community that has been a source of vital survival
information, psychic and emotional support for us. We have a distinct Black
woman-identified folk culture based on our experiences as Black women in this
society, symbols language and modes of expression that are specific to the
realities of our lives. Because Black women were rarely among those Blacks
and females who gained access to literary and other acknowledged forms of artistic expression, this
Black female bonding and Black woman-identification has often been hidden and
unrecorded except in the individual lives of Black women through our
own memories of one particular Black female tradition.63
Another layer of the lie is the frequently encountered implication
that women turn to women out of hatred for men Profound skepticism, caution,
and righteous paranoia about men may indeed be part of any healthy woman's
response to the woman-hatred embedded in male-dominated culture, to the forms
assumed by "normal" male sexuality, and to the failure even of
"sensitive" or "political" men to perceive or find these
troubling. Yet woman-hatred is so embedded in culture, so
"normal" does it seem, so profoundly is it neglected as a social
phenomenal, that any women, even feminists and lesbians, fail to identify it
until it takes, in their own lives, some permanently unmistakable and
shattering form Lesbian existence is also represented as mere refuge from male abuses,
rather than as an electric and empowering charge between women. I
find it interesting that one of the most frequently quoted literary passages on
lesbian relationship is that in which Colette's Renee, in The Vagabond,
describes "the melancholy and touching image of two weak creatures who
have perhaps found shelter in each other's arms, there to sleep and weep, safe
from man who is often cruel, and there to taste better than any
pleasure, the bitter happiness of feeling themselves akin, frail and forgotten [emphasis
added]."64 Colette is often considered a lesbian
writer; her popular reputation has, I think, much to do with the fact that she
writes about lesbian existence as if for a male audience her earliest
"lesbian" novels, the Claudene series, were written under
compulsion for her husband and published under both their names. At all events,
except for her writings on her mother, Colette is a far less reliable source on
lesbian existence than, I would think, Charlotte Bronte, who understood that while
women may, indeed must, be one another's allies, mentors, and comforters in the
female struggle for survival, there is quite extraneous delight in each other's
company and attraction to each others' minds and character, which proceeds from
a recognition of each others' strengths.
By the same token, we can say that there is a nascent feminist
political content in the act of choosing a woman lover or life partner in the
face of institutionalized heterosexuality.65 But for
lesbian existence to realize this political content in an ultimately liberating
form, the erotic choice must deepen and expand into conscious woman
identification--into lesbian/feminism.
The work that lies ahead, of unearthing and describing what I call
here lesbian existence, is potentially liberating for all women. It is work
that must assuredly move beyond the limits of white and middleclass Western
women's studies to examine women's lives, work, and groupings within every
racial, ethnic, and political structure. There are differences, moreover,
between lesbian existence and the lesbian continuum--differences we can discern
even in the movement of our own lives. The lesbian continuum, I suggest, needs
delineation in light of the double-life of women, not only women self-described
as heterosexual but also of self-described lesbians. We need a far more
exhaustive account of the forms the double-life has assumed. Historians need to
ask at every point how heterosexuality as institution has been organized and
maintained through the female wage scale, the enforcement of middle-class
women's "leisure, " the glamorization of so-called sexual liberation
the withholding of education from women, the imagery of "high art' and
popular culture, the mystification of the "personal" sphere, and much
else. We need an economics that comprehends the institution of heterosexuality,
with its doubled workload for women and its sexual divisions of labor, as the
most idealized of economic relations .
The question inevitably will arise: Are we then to condemn all heterosexual
relationships, including those that are least oppressive? I believe this
question, though often heartfelt, is the wrong question here. We have been
stalled in a maze of false dichotomies that prevents our apprehending the
institution as a whole: "good" versus "bad" marriages;
"marriage for love" versus arranged marriage; "liberated"
sex versus prostitution; heterosexual intercourse versus rape; Liebeschmerz versus
humiliation and dependency. Within the institutiol1 exist, of course,
qualitative differences of experience; but the absence of
choice remains the great unacknowledged reality, and in the absence of
choice, women will remain dependent on the chance or luck of particular
relationships and will have no collective power to determine the meaning and
place of sexuality in their lives. As we address the institution itself,
moreover, we begin to perceive a history of female resistance that
has never fully understood itself because it has been sofragmented,
miscalled, erased. It will require a courageous grasp of the politics
and economics, as well as the cultural propaganda, of heterosexuality to carry
us beyond individual cases or diversified group situations into the complex
kind of overview needed to undo the power men everywhere wield over
women, power that has become a model for every other form of
exploitation and illegitimate control.
Notes
This piece first appeared in the United Kingdom as a
pamphlet pub1ished by Onlywomen Press.
1. Alice Rossi, "Children and Work in the
Lives of Women," paper delivered at the University of Arizona, Tucson, February 1976.
3. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction
of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1978); Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur:
Sexual Arrangements and the HumanMalaise (New York:
Harper and Row, 1976); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For
Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday/& Anchor, 1978); Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New
Psychology of Women (Boston Beacon Press, 1976).
4. I could have chosen many other serious and
influential recent books, including anthologies, that would illustrate the same
point: e.g., Our Bodies, Ourselves, the Boston Women's Health
Collective's bestseller (New York: Simon and Schuster. 1976), which devotes a
separate (and inadequate) chapter to lesbians, but whose message is that
heterosexuality is most women's life preference; Berenice Carroll,
ed., Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1976), which does not include even a token essay
on the lesbian presence in history, though an essay by Linda Gordon, Persis Hunt,
et al. notes the use by male historians of "sexual deviance" as a
category to discredit and dismiss Anna Howard Shaw, Jane Addams, and other
feminists ("Historical Phallacies: Sexism in American Historical
Writing"); and Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koontz, eds., Becoming
Visible: Women In European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977),
which contains three mentions of male homosexuality but no materials that I
have been able to locate on lesbians. Gerda Lerner, ed., The
Female Experience: An American Documentary (Indianapolis Bobbs-Merrill,
1977), contains an abridgment of two lesbian/feminist position papers from the
contemporary movement but no other documentation or lesbian existence. Lerner
does note in her preface, however, how the charge of deviance has been used to
fragment women and discourage women's resistance. Linda Gordon, in Woman's
Rights: A Social History of Birth Control In America (New York:
Viking Press, 1976), notes accurately that "it is not that
feminism has produced more lesbians. There have always been many
lesbians, despite high levels or repression; and most lesbians experience their
sexual preference as innate" (p. 410).
6. Nancy Sahli,,"Smashing: Women's
Relationships Before the Fall," Chrysalis:. A Magazine
of Women's Culture 8(1979): 17-27. A version of the article was
presented at the Third Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June
11, 1976.
7. This is a book I have publicly endorsed. I
would still do so, though the above caveat. It is only since beginning to write
this article that I fully appreciated how enormous is the unmasked question inEhrenreich and
English's book.
8. Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979); Susan Brownmiller,
Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1975); Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Meta-Ethics of Radical Feminism
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1978); Susan Griffin, Woman and
Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper and Row, 1978); Diana
Russell and Nicole van de Vens, eds., Proceedings of the
International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women (Millbrae, Calif.:
Les Femmes, 1976).
14. Kathleen Gough, "The Origin of the
Family," in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975). pp. 69-70.
18. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre
English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Old
Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973); Andrea Dworkin, Woman
Hating, (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974), pp. 118-54; Daly, Gyn/
Ecology, pp. 178-222.
19. See Virginia Woolf, A Room of
One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929). and idem, Three
Guineas (l938; New York: Harcourt Brace,1966); Tillie Olsen,
Silences (Boston: Delacorte Press, 1978); Michelle
Cliff, "The Resonance of Interruption," Chrysalis:
A Magazine of Women's Culture 8 (1979): 29-37.
20. Mary Daly, Beyond God the
Father (Boston Beacon Press, 1973), pp. 347-51; Olsen, Silences, pp.
22 46.
22.Fran P. Hosken, "The Violence
of Power: Genital Mutilation of Females, "Heresies 6 (1979):
28-35; Russell and van de Ven, Proceedings, pp. 194-95.
24. The issue of "lesbian
sadomasochism “ needs to be examined in terms of the dominant
cultures' teachings about the relation of sex and violence, and also of the acceptance
by some lesbians or male homosexual mores. I believe this to be another example
of the double-life of women.
25.Catherine A. MacKinnon, Sexual
Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex
Discrimination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), pp.
15-16.
28. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment,
p. 219. Susan Schecter writes: "The push for heterosexual union
at whatever cost is so intense that . . . it has become a cultural force of its
own that creates battering.The ideology of romantic love and its jealous
possession of the partner as property provide the masquerade for what can
become severe abuse" (Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women[July-August
1979]: 50-51).
39. Ibid., p. 172
40. Elsewhere I have suggested that male-identification
has been a powerful source of male codes and systems who have
actively battled against it (Adrienne Rich, “Disloyal to Civilization:
Feminism, Racism,Genephobia,” in On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose,
196601978 [New York: W.W. Norton, 1979]).
41. Barry, Female Sexual Slavery, p. 220.
42. Susan Cavin, “Lesbian Origins,” Ph.D diss.,
Department of Sociology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 1978,
chap. 6.
43. For my perception of heterosexuality as an economic
institution, I am indebted to Lisa Leghorn and Katherine Parker, who allowed me
to read the unpublished manuscript of their book, Woman’sWorth: Sexual
Economics and the World of Women (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1981).
44. I would suggest that lesbian existence has been
most recognized and tolerated where it has resembled a “deviant” version of
heterosexuality; e.g., where lesbians have, like Stein and Toklas, played
heterosexual roles (or seemed to in public) and have been chiefly identified
with male cultures. See also Claude E. Schaeffer, “The Kuterai Female Berdache:
Courier, Guide, Phophetess and Warrier,”Ethnohistory 2,
no. 3 (Summer 1965): 193-236. (Berdache: “an individual of a definite
physiological sex [m. or f.] who assumes the role and status of the opposite
sex and who is viewed by the community as being of one sex physiologically but
as having assumed the role and status of the opposite sex” [Schaeffer, p. 231.]
Lesbian existence has also been relegated to an upper-class phenomenon, an
elite decadence (as in the fascination with Paris salon lesbians such as Renee Vivien
and Natalie Clifford Barney), to the obscuring of such “common women” as Judy Grahn depicts
in her The Work of a Common Woman (New York: St,. Martin’s
Press, 1980) and True to Life Adventure Stories (Oakland, Calif.:
Diana Press.
45. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p. 15.
46. “In a hostile world in which women are not supposed
to survive except in relation with and in service to men, entire communities of
women were simply erased. History tends to bury what it seeks to
reject” (Blanche W. Cook, “Women Alone Stir My Imagination: Lesbianism and the
Cultural Tradition,” Signs 4, no. 4 [Summer 1979];
719-20]. The Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York
City is one attempt to preserve contemporary documents on lesbian
existence—a project of enormous value and meaning, still pitted against the
continuing censorship and obliteration of relationships, networks, communities,
in other archives and elsewhere in the culture.
47. Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic
as Power, Out & Out Books Pamphlet No. 3 (New York: Out & Out Books
[476 2d Street, Brooklyn, New York 11215], 1979)
48. Adrienne Rich, “The conditions for Work: The common World of
Women,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, p. 209; H.D., Tribute
to Freud (Oxford: Carcanet Press, 1971), pp. 50-54.
49. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 126.
50. Gracia Clark, “The Beguines: A Mediaeval
Women’s Community,” Quest: A Feminist Quarterly 1,
no. 4 (1975): 73-80.
51. See Denise Paulme, ed., Women of
Tropical Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963),
pp. 7, 266-67. Some of these sororities are described as “a kind of
defensive syndicate against the male element”—their aims being “to offer
concerted resistance to an oppressive patriarchate,” independence in
relation to one’s husband and with regard to motherhood, mutual aid,
satisfaction of personal revenge.” See also Audre Lorde,
“Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving,” Black
Scholar 9, no. 7 (1978): 31-35; Marjorie Topley, “Marriage
Resistance in RuralKwangtung,” in Women in Chinese Society, ed. M.
Wolf and R. Witke (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1978), pp. 67-89; Agnes Smedley, Portraits of Chinese Women in
Revolution, ed. J.MacKinnon and S. MacKinnon (Old Westbury,
NY: Feminist Press, 1976), pp. 103-10.
52. See Rosalind Petchesky, “Dissolving the
Hyphen: A Report on Marxist-Feminist Groups 1-5,” in Capitalist Patriarcy and
the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah Eisenstein (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1979) p. 387.
53. Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men
Possessing Women (New York: G. P. Putnam Sons, 1981).
54. Russell and van de Ven, Proceedings,
pp. 42-43, 56-57.
55. I am indebted to Jonathan Katz’s Gay American History for
bringing to my attention Hansberry’s letters to Ladder and
to Barbara Grier for supplying me with copies of relevant pages from Ladder,
quoted here by permission of Barbara Grier. See also the reprinted
series of Ladder, ed. Jonathan Katz et al. (New York: Arno Press);
and Diedre Carmody, “Letters by Eleanor Roosevelt Detail Friendship
with Lorena Hickok,” New York Times, 21 October
1979.
56. Meridel LeSueur, The Girl (Cambridge,
Mass.: West End Press, 1978), pp. 10-11. LeSueur describes, in
an afterword, how this book was drawn from the writings and oral
narrations of women in the Workers Alliance who met as a writer’s group during
the Depression.
57. Ibid., p. 20.
58. Ibid., pp. 53-54.
59. Ibid., p. 55.
60. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York:
Bantam Books, 1973), pp. 103-4, 149. I am indebted to Lorraine
Bethel’s essay, “This Infinity of Conscious Pain: Zora Neale Hurston and
the Black Female Literary Tradition,” in All the Women Are White, All
the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, ed.
Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, N.Y.: The
Feminist Press, 1982.)
61. See Maureen Brady and Judith McDaniel, “Lesbians in
the Mainstream: The Image of Lesbians in Recent Commercial Fiction,” Conditions 6
(1979).
62. See Russell and van de Ven, Proceedings p.
40: “ . . . few heterosexual women realize their lack of free choice
about their sexuality, and few realize how and why compulsory heterosexuality
is also a crime against them.”
63. Bethel, “This Infinity of Conscious Pain.”
64. Dinnerstein, the most recent writer to quote this
passage, adds ominously: “But what has to be added to her account is that these
‘women enlaced’ are sheltering each other not just from what men want to do to
them, but also from what they want to do to each other” (The Mermaid, p.
103). The fact is, however, that women-to-woman violence is a minute grain in
the universe of male-against-female violence perpetrated and rationalized in
every social institution.
65. Conversation with Blanche W. Cook, New York
City, March 1979.
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