chapter 9

05_chap1.html

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 <h1>CHAPTER 1</h1>
 <h2>Who's Afraid of the Supreme Court?</h2>
-<p>After one of my workshops at the Michigan Women's Music Festival in the summer of 1987, a woman came up to talk to me. She told me she had been working frantically day and night to for the preceding two months to keep Bork off the Supreme Court. She had been writing letters and organizing others to write, holding publicmeetings, distributing flyers, talking to the media, setting up telephone networks - desperately doing everything she could think of. Her panic drove her into insomnia and depression and began to affect her health.</p>
+<p>After one of my workshops at the Michigan Women's Music Festival in the summer of 1987, a woman came up to talk to me. She told me she had been working frantically day and night for the preceding two months to keep Bork off the Supreme Court. She had been writing letters and organizing others to write, holding public meetings, distributing flyers, talking to the media, setting up telephone networks - desperately doing everything she could think of. Her panic drove her into insomnia and depression and began to affect her health.</p>
 <p>So she had come to Michigan to try to relax and rest but until my workshop had not been able to do so. As she listened to me, however, she thought, "What if she's right? What if it really doesn't matter who's on the Supreme Court?" Immediately, she felt as if an enormous burden had fallen from her shoulders. Her body felt light and buoyant, full of energy and zest. Feeling as if she hadn't breathed for two months, she filled her lungs with clear rain-washed air. The world that had appeared a uniform gray for so many weeks now glowed richly with color. She felt peaceful and happy - and this worried her.</p>
 <p>"Do you think I'm just being <i>irresponsible?</i>" she asked nervously.</p>
 <p>I know there are feminists who would have answered without hesitation, "Yes, I think you are!" But it seemed obvious to me that this woman, by daring to open herself to a seemingly fantastic possibility, had slipped through a crack in her programming and lived for a few precious moments in a free, nonpatriarchial world. I understood that for as long as she could stay outside her old beliefs and remain in the feeling of freedom she would be engaged in the actual creation of that new world. I told her I found her behavior eminently responsible, perhaps the only responsible behavior possible for women at this time in history.</p>
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 <p>From the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming comes a useful rule for resisters: "if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. So if you want change, do <i>anything</i> else!"<a href="#fn4">[4]</a></p>
 <p>As I thought about resistance being the most powerful, albeit the most subtle, form of collaboration possible, and speculated about the mechanics of it, into my mind sprang a picture of a fortress on a hill - patriarchy! - with its pennants flying, its great bulwarks, its massive gate, and all the men ranged behind its walls being male-ly supreme.</p>
 <p>Looking down the hill a short distance, I saw the women, thousands of them, a huge battering ram in their arms, crying "We've got to get through to the men! We've got to make them stop! We've got to get them to understand that they're destroying everything!" They run at the gate with the ram: Whoom! And again: Whoom! Over and over again, for five long millennia: Whoom! Whoom! Whoom! Some women are polevaulting over the walls, shouting as they leap: "If we can just get in there, we can change everything!" Through the centuries, women fall by the way but others quickly take their places and the desperate siege goes on, Whoom! Whoom!</p>
-<p>With my mind's eye, I looked to see what was happening <i>behind</i> the gate during all this and I could see it as clearly as if I were actually there: the men, drunk with adrenalin, are being spurred by the assault to incredible heights of creativity. They have invented bionic metals to reinforce the gate and walls wherever the ram reveals a weak spot, gradually making the fortress impregnable, impenetrable - ah, the sexual terms we have in English for not being able to get through! The assault, by forcing them to strengthen, refine, and embellish the original edifice, serves to entrench patriarchy further with every Whoom!</p>
+<p>With my mind's eye, I looked to see what was happening <i>behind</i> the gate during all this and I could see it as clearly as if I were actually there: the men, drunk with adrenaline, are being spurred by the assault to incredible heights of creativity. They have invented bionic metals to reinforce the gate and walls wherever the ram reveals a weak spot, gradually making the fortress impregnable, impenetrable - ah, the sexual terms we have in English for not being able to get through! The assault, by forcing them to strengthen, refine, and embellish the original edifice, serves to entrench patriarchy further with every Whoom!</p>
 <p>I should have learned from this image - and from my experience of being a woman in patriarchy - what Susan Horwitz called to my attention about this scenario. "It's obvious," she said, "that resistance is an acknowledgment and an acceptance of powerlessness. And if we perceive ourselves as powerless, presto, we <i>are</i> powerless."</p>
 <p>Motherhood should have taught me that resistance only causes deeper entrenchment. Any woman who has had teenagers will testify that when kids are doing something they shouldn't be doing and Mother nags about it, lectures about it, pleads about it, attacks it - in short, when she makes a federal case of it - the behavior only gets worse, often very creatively worse.Mothers finally learn that resistance is not the way to change kids' behavior. But being the least credible people in patriarchy, to ourselves as well as to others, we have a hard time believing that we, in our lowly kitchens, have stumbled upon a principle of human interaction that has cosmic implications.</p>
 <p>Talking to my friends that day about disengaging, part of what I knew was that if I were serious about "disappearing" patriarchy, I could never again work to get laws passed in the system. I finally understood that men, who own all laws - since they make, interpret, and enforce them - will never manipulate their legal system in a way that threatens their privilege.</p>
@@ -51,7 +51,7 @@ raping the colonials and their lands.</p>
 ineffective way of getting clean, she answered that we had to save those parts for our husbands, for marriage.</p>
 <p>My husband at the time was about five years old and living in Wisconsin. I'm sure he had no interest whatever in the fact that he owned some little girl's reproductive organs in Utah. But I can remember the feeling that experience gave me about my relationship with my body, and I can best describe it as housesitting until the landlord comes home. When one is housesitting someone else's property, one does not rummage through his private things, intimately handle his personal possessions. One behaves circumspectly, carefully, respecting the invisible "no trespassing" signs.</p>
 <p>After my speech at the International Women's Book Fair in Montreal in the summer of 1988, Margaret Hecimovich, a young ex-Catholic woman from the midwestem United States, told me that her childhood conditioning had been much fiercer even than mine. When she was a little girl, she was forbidden to <i>see</i> herself naked, even in the bathtub. Saving herself for her future lord and master, she washed her body under cover of a long flannel nightgown.</p>
-<p>Although most women apparently did not hear the words spoken, every woman bom gets the message subliminally, repeatedly and strongly, from her earliest days that she does not belong to herself. And the evidence that we have believed it until now has been our acceptance that men had a right to control our bodies and our lives. Every time we lobbied them for the right to choose whether or not we will have children, we acknowledged that men owned us.</p>
+<p>Although most women apparently did not hear the words spoken, every woman born gets the message subliminally, repeatedly and strongly, from her earliest days that she does not belong to herself. And the evidence that we have believed it until now has been our acceptance that men had a right to control our bodies and our lives. Every time we lobbied them for the right to choose whether or not we will have children, we acknowledged that men owned us.</p>
 <p>The burgeoning women's health movement of the early 70s was evidence of women's awareness of our physical colonization and of our realization that no matter what else we did, no matter how many laws we got men to pass, no matter how many low-echelon government and corporate positions we won, like the Nigerians and the Indians and all other colonized peoples, unless we had home rule, everything else we did to try to free ourselves was meaningless.</p>
 <p>So we were saying "howdy" to our cervixes for the first time in our lives, our own and our friends'. We may have been the 17th person to see them and the first 16 may have been men, but finally we were meeting them face to face. In doing so, we realized that it didn't take a man's eye to see a woman's cervix, it didn't take an American-Medical-Association, male-trained mind to diagnose the health of our reproductive organs or to treat them. We were shocked to remember how "natural" it had seemed to go to male gynecologists, and realized that, in fact, men's being gynecologists was <i>perverted</i>, gross, and sick and that our accepting them as experts on our bodies - when they had never had so much as one period in their lives, never experienced one moment of premenstrual psychic clarity, never had one birth pain, never suckled one child - was evidence of our ferocious internalized colonization. It began to appear as obscene to us as it truly is.</p>
 <p>As obvious as this may seem now, it hadn't been obvious for a very long time.</p>