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+<h1>CHAPTER 2</h1>
+<h2>A Better <i>Today</i></h2>
+<p>After the demise of the ERA in June 1982, everywhere I went in this country women were asking desperately, "What shall we do <i>now</i>? What shall we <i>do</i>? a relentless refrain that over the next few years took on a peculiarly nightmarish quality for me; I heard it in my dreams, echoing off the walls and along the corridors of my mind. If I had believed in myself and
+other women seriously enough then, it would have taken me only a short time to figure out that it was the wrong question, and why. The clue was that we <i>couldn't</i> answer it. Women are brilliant, individually and together. If we couldn't answer it, it had to be because it was not answerable; it had to be that it was the wrong question.</p>
+<p>As I thought about that, I began to understand that it was an unanswerable question because we can't postulate a new paradigm standing in and saturated by the old one. How, for instance, can we devise plans, how can we even <i>imagine</i> what women would do if we were free of patriarchy - free in the cells of our bodies, our genes and chromosomes, every atom of our brains? We haven't seen women feel and act free for over 5,000 years. Even if we could remember back before patriarchy, there has never been a time on this planet when women have been in the situation we are now in, so even our species' memory contains no model. The only way we are going to know how free women behave is to become free ourselves and watch our own behavior. Only then can we say with authority, "<i>This</i> is what free women do!"</p>
+<p>But in the meantime, we can't think from bondage into freedom, we can't ask, "What should we <i>do</i>?" because if we do, we have none but the old conditioned answers; the horizons of our imaginations are limited by our old blinders.</p>
+<p>We <i>can</i> think, however, "How do I want to feel, how do I want to be in the new world?" It took me four years of thinking about it almost continually to reach the conclusion that those were the relevant questions, the questions answerable in non-collaborative, changeeffecting terms: "how shall we <i>be</i>? How shall we feel about ourselves? What kind of a world
+do we want for ourselves <i>right now</i>?" It took me another year to understand why those are the relevant questions and why resistance is profoundest collaboration. It took women's insistence that I explain myself more fully, that I offer more satisfactory reasoning for the
+conclusions I had reached with intuitive leaps. Through the whole process, I learned that if I could ask the right question, the answer followed almost at once.</p>
+<p>Working to clarify my theory, I remembered that shortly after I became a feminist in 1977, I attended a feminist event where I heard an idea that made tears of relief pour down my cheeks and that now seems to me basic to any discussion of how to make the new world we long for. The woman speaking said, "A fundamental feminist principle is that the means are the ends; that <i>how</i> we do something is <i>what</i> we get."</p>
+<p>The tears of relief were from realizing that I wasn't stupid after all and I have since figured out why I had always thought I was, how much of my life-long feeling of alienation that principle explains.</p>
+<p>I went through the entire male educational system feeling intellectually inferior to men, as if a part of my brain weren't functioning. I endured countless agonizing moments of being terrified that others would see through my disguise of intelligence to my true witlessness.</p>
+<p>I remember sitting in one graduate seminar after another, the men in their tweed jackets with leather elbows, pulling on their pipes - English departments are incredibly stuffy - talking, as I trusted then, eruditely about their ideas, taking themselves very seriously. I felt humble and wormlike in their presence, full of gratitude to be allowed to sit at their
+feet. But there was often a place in their discussion where reason seemed to skip a beat. At first I would interrupt and say something like, "Uh, Arnold ... I didn't follow that. Would you please, uh, <i>recapitulate</i> a little?"</p>
+<p>Every face in the room - and in those days most of the faces were male - would turn slowly toward me. With pained looks everyone would sigh as if to say, "Why did we even allow
+them to learn to <i>read</i>?" A couple of such humiliating scenes was all it took to silence me. After that, when they came to the places in their discourse that I couldn't follow, I simply faked it. Like everyone else in the room, I looked wise and nodded my head and murmured, "Um hum, um hum." Over the years I got so good at faking it that sometimes I'd even nudge the fellow next to me with my elbow and murmur, "Interesting, hmm?"</p>
+<p>So I faked my way through a master's program and bluffed my way through a doctorate, thinking the while that everyone else must be very smart to be getting the connection I always seemed to be missing. I got so good at faking it, in fact, that I forgot I <i>was</i> faking it. But on some level, I knew I didn't get it at all.<a href="#fn1">[1]</a></p>
+<p>But recently I have come to understand much more fully the implications of what I learned in that feminist gathering that night. Not just that I was right all along, that reason <i>had</i> skipped beats, my colleagues <i>had</i> missed connections. But more significantly, the reason I hadn't got the point of their arguments was that they <i>weren't gettable</i>. The very structure of male thought is faulty.</p>
+<p>Now that I have become aware of it, I hear men's spurious cause-and-effect, goal-oriented, five-year-plan, means-to-ends "reasoning" a dozen times a day. But of the multifarious examples of it, the one that illustrates most clearly how it skews and distorts reality is this:</p>
+<p>Men say that, their goal being peace, naturally they are going to have to bomb and bomb and massacre and rape and pillage and torture and lay waste and then - this is the place at which I used to feel as if I were the only person on earth who hadn't caught on - suddenly, miraculously, there will come a magical moment, a moment when some sort of alchemy takes place, and - <i>voila!</i> - peace!</p>
+<p>Hey guys, run that by me again, will ya?</p>
+<p>Women have always known on some level that there is only one way to have peace and that is to be peaceful right now. We have understood that, because the means are the ends, <i>how</i> we behave is <i>what</i> we get.</p>
+<p>But as I thought this idea through time and time again during the last couple of years, I found that it wasn't enough for me that some feminist had once asserted that it was true, or that my intuition - that I call "my wise woman inside" - had shouted, "Yes!" when I'd heard it, or that it explained so much that had been inexplicable. I wanted the theory, the how and the why of it. I wanted to get it with all my faculties, feel more intellectually satisfied with it. I needed to think it through for myself.</p>
+<p>I found that the key to understanding it more satisfactorily came from atomic physics, the idea that in our atomic universe there is no such thing as linear time.<a href="#fn2">[2]</a> Atomic science tells us that, contrary to how we have been conditioned to perceive it, time does not move from here to
+there, it is <i>not</i> like a river, it is not "passing," not going anywhere. Instead, it simply <i>is</i>, like the ocean, and we are in it as fish are in the sea. Time is our medium. We are at any moment in all the time there ever was or ever will be, surrounded by time in the form, paradoxically, of, at once, only an instant and also eternity.</p>
+<p>Because there is no past or future separate from the present (since all time is together here right now), the past and the future exist only in the present. There is not a detached blob of time somewhere out in the ocean called "future ocean," or a partial blip of ocean left behind called "past ocean." Like the ocean, all time is together and now.</p>
+<p>This is immensely important for several reasons. For one thing, it means that since this moment is the only time we have, the only time we have the power to change or create anything is right this moment. One of the crudest crimes of patriarchy has been to teach us to project our thoughts into a future that will never come (getting together our vitae and our five-year-plans) or focusing us back into a past that is only memories of a present, keeping us unaware of the locus of our power in the present moment and effectively imprisoning us in time.</p>
+<p>But an even more crucial reason for understanding time as an ocean rather than as a river is that if all time is together in this moment, the present and the future are not separate. More than this, since the future is in the birth canal of the present, we can predict the future by what we are doing in the present. What we are doing in the present is <i>creating</i> the future, <i>is</i> the future.</p>
+<p>For me the implications of this are stunning. It answers the question of how we go about making a new world right here in the putrid debris of senile patriarchy: we <i>do now</i> what we want to be doing in the future, we <i>be now</i>, <i>feel now</i> how we thought we could be and feel only in some future time.</p>
+<p>This means that if we want a future world in which women are not afraid - of rape and poverty and humiliation and other male violence - there is only one way to create it and that is by being unafraid now. We can't first try to change the men so women don't have to be afraid of them. If we do this now, we make the future one in which women, in fear, continue to try to change men. We can't get to fearlessness from being afraid; a magical moment of alchemy when fearlessness appears is as impossible as peace appearing out of rape and pillage. We make a fear-free world by being unafraid in this moment, the only moment we live.</p>
+<p>Because what we are doing and feeling now determines the future, we can make a world in which women are not sacrificing our time and energy, our needs and desires, for someone else's better world down the line somewhere, by not sacrificing now or ever again.</p>
+<p>The wise old woman who lives inside me told me this emphatically in my early days as a feminist, but I didn't take her seriously then. When I first came into the Women's Movement over a decade ago during the ERA campaign, I attended meeting after meeting in which speakers, trying to pump up flagging enthusiasm, said something like, "I know you're exhausted; so am I. We've all been working so diligently and bravely, nearly burning ourselves out. And even though we know we probably won't see the results of our labors in our lifetimes, I for one say it's been worth it. It's been worth it to make sure our children have a better world than we had. So I'm not going to give up, and I know you're not going to either. Right?" And the audience would fairly scream as one, "Right! We'll never give up!"</p>
+<p>Though my innards were complaining, "Yuk! I don't want a better tomorrow; I want a better <i>today</i>!" I would squish this renegade feeling and shout, "I'll never give up!" right along with everybody else, knowing, none better, that how long you could put off present for greater future gratification was one of patriarchy's prime criteria for true adulthood. I don't believe that any more, of course. Cause and effect, as men have perceived and taught it, simply does not explain my reality and never has. Neither does their hatred and fear of pleasure.</p>
+<p>I have also stopped believing the lie that the change we want takes a very long time and will happen sometime, somewhere out there in the future. I am certain that the future is now, that what men erroneously call "the future" does not exist. Because it does not exist, there can be no cause and effect, no getting there from here. There is simply being there, being now the way we want to be and the way we want women to be in a new world, not doing other "interim" things in some futile effort to <i>get</i> there. Doing "interim" things makes a future in which women in vain continue to do "interim" things.</p>
+<p>This means that if we want a future world in which women are not on our knees pleading with men to be a little kinder - economically, politically, legally, religiously, personally - we must get up off our knees right now. There is no magic moment when groveling suddenly becomes self-respect and independence of spirit.</p>
+<p>Neither is there any moment of alchemy when getting women into office will change the system, because what women have to do today to get into office <i>determines</i> what they will be doing in the future. There is simply no getting to a feminist value system by acting out of the old patriarchal values of competition, expediency, hierarchy. Another way of saying that the means are the ends is to point out that we can't touch filth, even while trying to clean it up, without getting it on our hands.</p>
+<p>Women say, "But if I can get in there, I can subvert their system for women's ends." But since the only genuinely subversive act for prisoners of war is to get out, the very fact of staying in prevents a woman from being subversive. Thinking of the women who got "in," I consider that I haven't seen one instance of their subverting the system. Any liberal man could have done as well or better for women since he wouldn't have been seen as not being objective, as favoring his own group. I wonder, when I hear a woman say that <i>she</i> will succeed in subversion where others have failed, what makes her think she is the exceptional one? I wonder why we can't honor other women's experience, learn from it, and say, "If they didn't change the system, it's because they couldn't. If being as they are -  strong, smart, courageous women - they couldn't do it, it's because it can't be done." Thousands have tried and failed. I suggest we thank them for making clear its futility and move on.</p>
+<p>There is no getting to integrity from not having any now, from voting for the least offensive candidates, for instance, knowing that at best their vision is reformist and that reform is collusion. Voting for either men or women in this system is voting <i>for</i> the system, for patriarchy, which is based on the hatred of women. So there is no way on earth for selfloving women to vote without compromising our integrity. We are living in the future this moment, creating it breath by breath. What we do and how we do it right now is the world of the future.</p>
+<p>Some people were shocked that I didn't vote in the 1988 election. I was shocked that they <i>did</i>. The day after, I overheard a conversation on a plane in which one man was lamenting to another: "It seems to me that we never have a decent candidate any more, that we have to vote for the lesser of two evils every time. I can't understand it." If he had realized that by voting for the lesser of two evils, he helped create a world in which he would always have to vote for the lesser of two evils; if he had understood that by voting for evil <i>at all</i>, even if for a lesser evil, he was still voting for evil, and that since everyone who voted, voted for evil - either a lesser
+or greater one - surely there was no possible way to get anything <i>but</i> evil; if he had understood that what he was doing every moment of his life was determining future moments, he would have been shocked to see his collusion in the deteriorating political situation that he deplored. We cannot compromise our integrity and have a reality with integrity anymore than we can have peace by waging war.</p>
+<p>It seems to me, therefore, that if we want a world in which women have integrity and are independent, self-governing, and untamed - and patriarchy cannot survive women's being any of these - we have to have integrity, be independent, self-governing, and wild <i>right now</i>. The new world, the feminist world, is not somewhere off in a nonexistent future. That world is either right now or it is never. To the degree that this moment we feel independent of men and their system and do not participate in it, we live in a world where patriarchy cannot exist. Men cannot do patriarchy without our fear and dependence.</p>
+<p>I want the new world to be a place in which everyone is guided by the integrity of their own self-loving inner voice all the time. So when the woman under the tree in Michigan asked me if I thought she was being irresponsible, I told her, "You don't have to believe a word <i>I</i> say. I could be on the wrong track altogether. You don't need to listen to or believe anyone else on earth. But it seems to me that to have integrity you must believe your own voice, the voice that just spoke to you through your body."</p>
+<p>Because our bodies cannot be either in the past or in the future as our brains can, but are anchored firmly in the present - the only time we are alive and therefore the only time we have power - they are absolutely trustworthy messengers. Men have tried manfully to disconnect spirit and mind and body to prevent our having integrity, to keep us from piecing together our shattered voice. But the truth is that we are whole - spirit and mind and body intimately interwoven with one another, each existing in and informing the others. When our bodies speak, they make us privy to the intentions of our spirits and deep minds.</p>
+<p>Our bodies are easy to understand if we will listen to them and take them seriously. What does that really mean? Many women feel the rightness of what they are thinking and doing affirmed somewhere in their bodies, in the pits of their stomachs, for instance, or in their chests. I experience the "right" or "go" signal very strongly in the high center of my torso, between my abdomen and back ribs, and often simultaneously all over and throughout my body. Sometimes my skin prickles.</p>
+<p>I explained further to the woman in Michigan my belief that when we are doing or thinking things that are truly freeing, or when we are being free in some way, we feel free right that moment - light, buoyant, full of hope and energy and love - that's how we know we're on the right track. "When did you expect to feel liberated, and what did you think it was going to feel like?" I demanded of her. "Whatever and whenever, the feeling you just described to
+me - <i>this</i> is <i>it</i>, the time and feeling you've been longing and working so hard for and thought was far off in a mythical future somewhere."</p>
+<p>When I have this feeling, I hold on to it as long as I can. Its very gloriousness has much to teach me about reality. Anytime I want it back, I remember how I got to it in the first place. I "am" in the present the way I hoped to be sometime in the new feminist world. I practice seeing and feeling the vibrant colors around me, feel the breeze on my skin, breathe deeply and often, touch everything, wake up, come alive, be unafraid, forgive myself, love myself madly, be joyful. Patriarchy cannot exist in the presence of life and joy and fearlessness and love of self, so all the while any of us are experiencing these feelings, we make and hold a space in the cosmos where there is no oppression of women. When enough of us create such a space inside and around ourselves, when enough of us feel free of the imperatives of this system, moment by moment, freedom will become reality for all women in the world.</p>
+<p>The principle that the means are the ends provides more - and more conclusive - evidence that resistance is not only futile, but that it literally and actively strengthens the things resisted. Our failure to understand this principle earlier explains to me why the Women's Movement has not yet created a new world, let alone transformed the old one. I understand
+now why women's resistance - our protesting, demonstrating, lobbying, demanding - did not and cannot change patriarchy.</p>
+<p>Resistance is the other, essential half of the war model: attack/resist; it takes both attack and resistance together to make war. Resistance, therefore, <i>is</i> war, and since the means are the ends, war can only produce more war, never peace.</p>
+<p>The bumper sticker says it all: "What if they threw a war and nobody came?" The men are still throwing the age-old, all-out, global, gynecidal war against women, but I'm not going, and if I don't go, they can't use my resistance to keep the war going. If enough of us don't go, they can't throw the war at all. I want women everywhere not to go to the war anymore. I want us not to turn up on the battlefield thinking we can win when we can only be slaughtered.</p>
+<p>For this reason, I no longer think of myself as a "woman warrior" as I once did. I am not fighting anything or anyone anymore, not mimicking men's old deadly pattern. I think of myself and other like-minded women now as the goddess,<a href="#fn3">[3]</a> creating a new pattern, creating the world afresh.</p>
+<p>As soon as enough of us - and it doesn't need the majority, just the critical mass of us - feel right now how we thought we were going to feel down the road sometime when the men had changed and when bit by bit we had knocked down the patriarchal fortress, the moment the small number that is the critical mass of us is able to live moment by moment in the new mind, that is the moment when that mind will become the general mind of the planet. Living in that world is the way it can become reality, in the same way that living in the patriarchal mind moment by moment has been keeping patriarchy real. Just as there is no way to have peace but to be peaceful right now, there is no way to have joy, fearlessness, and freedom except to feel them right now.</p>
+<p>From these feelings will come behavior that will move us into a reality organic to those feelings, consonant with them. Acting out of feelings of self-worth, for instance, we immediately create a world in which we are worthy. We can tell when we truly love and respect and honor ourselves because we are no longer able to behave like slaves. We do not have to plan how not to; we simply find that when we respect ourselves we cannot, for instance, beg men, cannot lobby them. Appropriate new behavior comes out of appropriate new feelings.</p>
+<p>Acting out of fearlessness, we create a world in which we do not need to be afraid. As Elsa Gidlow says, "My observation is that the Lesbians who suffer are the ones unsure within themselves, always fearing they will be condemned. <i>They thus attract what they dread</i> [italics added], as weakness cruelly invites and encourages the bully."<a href="#fn4">[4]</a></p>
+<p>Acting with integrity, we create a world in which we can be whole. We know when we have integrity because we are unable to compromise ourselves, and we can monitor our internal revolution by how much we are able to participate in the present woman-hating system. Future reality is transformed when we change our feelings about ourselves - and hence our behavior - in the present.</p>
+<p>So if we want a world in which women love and trust ourselves and one another, <i>right now</i> we must feel that love and trust. Women's learning to respect and honor women is the basis of a spiritual revolution that is changing what it means to live as human beings on Earth.</p>
+<p>The old saying that tomorrow never comes is literally and absolutely true. If we want a feminist world, there is only this moment to have it in.</p>
+<p>A couple of deeply entrenched bits of conditioning make my practicing this theory, my living in this new place moment by moment, very difficult. Generalizing as usual from a sample of one, I assume that if these are troublesome for me, they are troublesome for many other women.</p>
+<p>One of these pervasive messages is that change can only come about through struggle, that we aren't making any difference unless we're batting our heads against concrete walls, unless it's all very difficult and we are miserable. We've been taught, in fact, that we can gauge how much change we're making by how much we're suffering.</p>
+<p>I can't think of a better example of patriarchal reversal because the truth is exactly the opposite: all we can get by struggle, by pain and misery, is more struggle, more pain, and more misery. But because of our socialization, we have a hard iime <i>feeling</i> - though we may believe it - that anything as wonderful as feeling wonderful can possibly bring a new reality into being. That out of feeling wonderful will emerge <i>action</i> of such transcendent difference, brilliance, and power that we cannot begin to imagine it.</p>
+<p>Our inability to accept this is largely a matter of guilt - feeling guilty for not suffering when others <i>are</i>. This is the other recalcitrant chunk of conditioning. Surely if we feel joyous and free while all over the world so many of our sisters are wretched, we must be racist and classist and ageist and able-bodiest - we must not care about anybody but ourselves.</p>
+<p>Diana Rabenold addresses this when she writes:</p>
+<blockquote>The <i>fact</i> of women's subordination as a group becomes internalized in individual women as a belief that their personal needs are not important: that to ask for what they want or to get their needs met is selfish, that they are only good and OK if they always put the needs of
+others first. Indeed, the accusation of "selfishness" - however subtly communicated - has ironically been perhaps the greatest barrier to women's development of a strong sense of Self with which to <i>be</i> "Self-ish!"<a href="#fn5">[5]</a></blockquote>
+<p>Elsa Gidlow, working-class woman, life-long Lesbian, puts it this way:</p>
+<blockquote>Have you ever wakened to the realization that you were happy? It's hard to put into words where it comes from, the sudden awareness that the day is somehow transformed by radiance. Like this morning... why am I visited by this sense of all being well? All is not well, as every newscaster will tell us. Should I listen? Or shall I allow the uninvited happiness to illumine the day while outdoors the rain incontinently pours down and everywhere people suffer? Do I have a right to it?... Must we <i>deserve</i> a rainbow?<a href="#fn6">[6]</a></blockquote>
+<p>The answer is yes, that's what we've been taught, that we must "deserve" a rainbow, that we get the rainbow only if we work for it, struggle for it, suffer for it, sacrifice enough for others. But the truth is that our simply being alive, simply being <i>us</i> gives us a right to rainbows, and it is neither necessary nor useful to continue to try to earn happiness by rescuing first everyone else who is suffering.</p>
+<p>Women have asked me if I mean that if we all just go sit in our hot tubs and think about our careers and be contented, everything will come right with the world. I was on a NOW panel with a friend who couldn't resist a little jab at "those who believe we should just contemplate our navels."</p>
+<p>I'm always surprised by such misunderstanding, perhaps since I know that all my thought and behavior is focused upon bringing into existence an actual new global society, that this is what I believe women are here to do, the reason we were born, and that this is anything <i>but</i> passive. In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of more radical action than this.</p>
+<p>Perhaps one of the reasons for the misunderstanding is that what I am saying seems to echo the political contextlessness and passivity of the New Age Movement, a movement that daily subverts the Women's Movement and steals adherents from it by mimicking women's culture, by glossing the surface with woman-like rhetoric while seething underneath with the same old misogyny. The fact and history of male domination of women and of <i>any</i> oppression and suffering is denied and erased under the headings of "Be Here Now!" and "Whatever is, is right!"</p>
+<p>My daughter, Kari, tells me on the telephone that a great deadness has fallen upon the town where she lives since so many people are living lives with no politics, no context, no history - New Age lives. One day as she and an acquaintance were talking on the street, a man walked by, eyed Kari up and down and said suggestively, "Hey, Chick!" Bored, not even turning to look at him, she told him to "fuck off." Her friend was shocked. "If you were living in the present," she said, "you could see that that guy, deep down, is really a fine person. Why can't you take it that way?" The idea that living in the moment means that whatever is, is right, that there is no history, no context for behavior, is wrong-headed and dangerous hocus-pocus.</p>
+<p>The New Age concept of "being here now" seems to me grossly reductionist, reducing the moment to its smallest, most drastically exclusive denominator, as if it is all there is of history, of truth, even of sensory possibility. In this process, everything - all acts, thoughts, and perceptions - becomes totally relative and of equal importance, equal good, and judgment becomes an undesirable, even antisocial, act.</p>
+<p>When I speak of living in this moment, I am not talking about living any old way and saying that any way is as good as any other way. I am not speaking of ignoring or denying political reality, oppression and pain. I am saying that we must live <i>as if</i> we were free, <i>as if</i> we were in every way the women we have dreamed of becoming, <i>as if</i> the world were as we wish it to be, and in saying that, I preserve history, provide context, expand the moment to its largest inclusiveness, I make judgment a moral necessity, I imply transcendence.</p>
+<p>The suffering of the women of the world, past and present, has haunted my waking hours and my dreams since the night I woke to it in a Mormon church meeting, the night a dozen years ago that I became a feminist. I have not forgotten their suffering for a single second since. But I have had to face the difficult truth that all the things women have done to try to make the system work for them only made matters worse: every statistic describing
+violence against women has soared in the last 20 years; the government itself tells us that by the year 2,000 the entire poverty population of the United States of America will be women and our children.</p>
+<p>I for one am no longer willing to keep on doing harmful things for selfish reasons - to keep my conscience comfortably salved or to prove to others that I really care about women. Regardless of any risk to either my conscience or to my reputation, I am determined to make a world and live in it right now in which violence against women is unthinkable, in which poverty for women and children is unthinkable. I understand now why we can't stop these in the ways we've tried up to now, and I can't bear to keep on making them worse.</p>
+<p>The best I know to do is to invite all women of every race and class, every age, every sexual
+proclivity, every physical endowment, who are looking for another way, all women who can't stand the ugly vicious system one moment longer to join me and thousands of other women in this country in making a new world. And I mean this literally: <i>to make a new world - physically, economically, socially, in every way.</i> I am determined above all else to try to live feminism, as I understand it better daily, and to live <i>in</i> feminism every moment precisely because I <i>do</i> care, precisely because I <i>do</i> love women. I know I can't free anyone but myself, but my inner voice tells me that in freeing myself, I make freedom more accessible to all other women.</p>
+<p>The assumption that we show true concern, real love, by trying to rescue others is a particularly perverse patriarchal tenet-another reversal. "Rescue" is the other side of "victim," essential to it, a component part. There must be rescuers for there to be victims, and visa versa. Some say white women are racist if we do not continue to try to rescue the women of color in the ghettos of our cities and of the world. But the Lady Bountiful attitude of white women in believing that women of color need us to rescue them, that they can't do what they need to do for themselves - <i>that</i> kind of condescension and need to control others is what seems to me to be racist.<a href="#fn7">[7]</a></p>
+<p>What I hear women of color saying to me is that what I can do for them - and for myself - is to wrest racism out of my soul. To make the space inside and around me nonracist space, adding this space to the other nonracist spaces on the planet until ultimately that is the space that prevails.</p>
+<p>I don't hear them asking me to take care of them; as far as I can see, they neither need nor want me to. Women of color the world over are freeing themselves in most amazing ways, and their rising is the very foundation of the global Women's Movement, the single most significant and transformative event of this age. I can be grateful to them, I can listen to them, and I can support them in every way open to me, I can care and love and applaud, and when I can, give of my resources. But I can't make the system work for them. It's just not going to work for women of <i>any</i> color or class.</p>
+<p>I have given up rescuing so that I do not help create victims. I am not even trying to save the world any more, not even focused on trying to save myself. I am simply determined to find freedom, right now, by changing myself. As my friend A. E. Dropper puts it:</p>
+<blockquote>It means that the world as one knows it falls apart completely when you change yourself. For a radical feminist, patriarchy falls apart. And a few years down the road you might try to get patriarchy back for the sake of making conversation with a radical feminist in your kitchen, and damned if you can't get it back. But you can't. It's a little dizzying, but you can't forget that you haven't suffered for awhile, and that all your days and nights are filled with meaning. (Correspondence, December 11,1987.)</blockquote>
+<p>What I am doing now is walking by the side of any woman who is traveling in my direction, listening to her ideas about how we can practice being free, sharing with her the fullness of my heart at having her company in this greatest of all human journeys, the journey to transcendence that never ends, widening and clearing the path as we walk, clearing resting places.</p>
+<p>Sometimes women quote the well-known "When they came for the Jews" passage<a href="#fn8">[8]</a> as evidence that we must rescue others in danger or else when our turn comes no one will come to our aid. They give the necessity to stop the Hitlers of the world as one reason why we must fight wars. To these women I reply:</p>
+<p>Every day patriarchy comes for <i>you</i> again, to get your mind and heart again, to destroy you, body and soul. If you cannot extricate yourself from its grasp, if you are imprisoned, how can you expect to free anyone else? The first step is to get free ourselves in all the ways we know are necessary. And as we break free, we make a hole in the paradigm that others can escape through with us. Somehow, in ways we're just beginning to glimpse, we help make liberation possible for everyone when we liberate ourselves.</p>
+<p>When we free ourselves, we destroy patriarchy at the root. Trying to clip off its buds has not been successful. In stopping Hitler, we did not in any way impede the propensity for patriarchy to produce Hitlers; there is now a potential Hitler on every street comer. In fact, in fighting against Hitler, others became like him. Though Hitler is responsible for millions of hideous deaths, every country that fought him also killed millions of innocent people in terrible ways. In trying to stop a tyrant, they had to become tyrants. We become what we resist.</p>
+<p>None of this means that we should stand by while others are hurt and not do what we can, but if resistance is the most powerful collaboration, the question is, how can we truly help and not hinder?</p>
+<p>Denmark approached this problem with exquisite creativity. Not to hide the Jews - because in hiding them they would have made a world where Jews must be hidden in order to be safe - but to make Jewishness extra visible: every Dane to wear a yellow Star of David, every Dane to be a Jew. If enough countries had done this, there would have come into being a world in which being visible as a Jew would be the greatest safety.</p>
+<p>This was not civil disobedience, it was not resistance; it was living in the kind of world right then that they wanted to have in the future.</p>
+<p>It is women's destiny to create a world in which Hitler is unthinkable and therefore impossible. Another world, right now, right here, a safe, joyous, healthful, loving place, <i>home</i> for our species and all other living things. This is what I think we are about, those of us women fortunate enough to live at this time. Often during my speeches I ask the women in the room who feel as if they were bom to do an immense work of great consequence to raise their hands. More than half always do and I suspect that the ones who don't very likely would if I were to ask them again in a few years.</p>
+<p>I take women seriously. If we feel that we came specifically at this time to work wonders, I trust that that <i>is</i> why we came. And I trust that one of those wonders will be our leaving the patriarchal state in smoking ruins behind us, reduced to ashes by our passion for freedom.</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> Did <i>you</i> get why men adore <i>Moby Dick</i>? <i>M. Dick</i> is the most boring and pointless book I ever forced myself to read in my life, and that's saying a great deal since I forced myself through tons of their grim "great" books.</p>
+<p><a id="fn2">[2]</a> Like many other women, I am hearing the concepts from atomic physics not as if I am learning them for the first time, but Hke echoes, like memories - like not-quite-accurate memories. I'm pretty certain from my own experience that during archaic women's times all of us understood and felt time and space and our place in the universe in a completely different way, that men are only now beginning to suspect the existence of that mode of consciousness, that they have so far to go and so much to revise that women must leave them to it and rush on ahead <i>experiencing</i> it.</p>
+<p><a id="fn3">[3]</a> I explain what I mean by this in my book, <i>Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation</i>, The Crossing Press: Freedom, CA, 1987, Chapter 1.</p>
+<p><a id="fn4">[4]</a> Elsa Gidlow, <i>Elsa: I Come With My Songs</i>. Booklegger Press: San Francisco, 1986, p. 252.</p>
+<p><a id="fn5">[5]</a> Diana Rabenold, <i>Love, Politics, and "Rescue" in Lesbian Relationships</i>, p. 5.</p>
+<p><a id="fn6">[6]</a> Elsa Gidlow, <i>Elsa: I Come With My Songs</i>, p. 306.</p>
+<p><a id="fn7">[7]</a> I am not suggesting that all "helping" activities are "rescue": useless and/or collaborative. Teaching women in Nicaragua, for instance, how to build their own houses, or set up clinics, helps all women involved to discover their power. I <i>am</i> suggesting, though, that unless we are fully conscious as we participate in them that we cannot rescue anyone, that unless each Nicaraguan women does her own internal revolution, these activities will not only <i>not</i> change the world but will ultimately aid the patriarchs of Nicaragua, who still own the women and all they produce. We need also to remember that if we do not attend to our own personal internal revolutions at the same time that we are helping others, we are not really helping anyone, either ourselves, the women of Nicaragua, or any other of the women of the world.</p>
+<p><a id="fn8">[8]</a> Attributed to Martin Niemoeller, the entire quote is: In Germany they came first for the communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. They came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.</p>

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+<h1>CHAPTER 3</h1>
+<h2>The Great Divorce</h2>
+<p>As I have talked to slightly bewildered audiences across the country about women's relationship with the patriarchal state, trying to make clear what I thought we ought to do about it and why, a way of understanding and expressing it more clearly has come to me. Earlier, I had recognized that the system behaved - in the case of <i>Roe v. Wade</i>, for example - in the same manner toward women generally as one husband behaves specifically toward one wife. My seeing this brought women's situation in patriarchy into much sharper focus.</p>
+<p>All women are battered women in patriarchy. Every woman born is in an abusive relationship with men as a class and with their system since the raison d'etre of all men's institutions - political, legal, educational, religious, economic, and social - is to achieve and perpetuate the slavery of women and the dominion of men. Therefore, if we can understand why one woman stays in an abusive relationship with one man<a href="#fn1">[1]</a> - and the Women's Movement has taught us much about this-we can understand why women as a caste stay in our abusive relationship with the state. It follows that if we can understand what it takes for one woman to extricate herself permanently from a battering situation, we can understand what it will take for <i>all</i> women to extricate ourselves permanently from patriarchy - our brutal relationship with men as a class. Finally, if we can understand what happens to a marriage when a woman finally and unequivocally leaves it, we can predict what will happen when women finally and unequivocally leave our marriage with our husband the state.</p>
+<p>Many of us grew up watching our fathers abuse our mothers - physically or emotionally or both - and were filled with confusion and rage. We couldn't understand why they took it, why they didn't just <i>leave</i>. Standing outside our mothers' situations, we could see that they had options, reasonable options, and we assumed that they could see them too.</p>
+<p>What we have learned since, however, from our own sad experience or from listening to other women's stories, is that in the midst of cruelty, many women really cannot see any way out; as far as they are aware, they have no choices. They are trapped in the invisible reality of their feelings and perceptions and beliefs.</p>
+<p>How does a woman lose her consciousness of alternatives? What are the mechanisms that have to come into play not only to make her believe that she is choice-less but also to weld her so tightly to her aggressor that leaving him seems life threatening?</p>
+<p>On the most overt level is what I call SHATTER- Self-Hatred and Terror-the continuing education program her husband or husband-surrogate subjects her to in his capacity as agent-in-place for the male hegemony. His job is to reinforce and intensify the conditioning of her other intensive trainers-the media, her parents, ministers, teachers, society in general. In this guerrilla warfare against her, he has global male culture as his model, his authority, his back-up, and his resource.</p>
+<p>Though not every abusive husband employs all the following indoctrination and intimidation tactics, most must use many of them to achieve the desired effect. A man intent on dehumanizing a woman, for instance, often tries to isolate her, to control what she does, who she sees and talks to, and where she goes. He may harass her economically by trying to prevent her from getting or keeping a job, making her ask for money, giving her an allowance, or taking any money she makes. He is likely to force her into sexual acts against her will, attacking the sexual parts of her body, raping her, and generally treating her as a sex object. And, of course, physical abuse is standard: he beats her, throws her down, twists her arms, trips, bites, pushes, shoves, slaps, chokes, pulls her hair, punches, kicks, grabs, and/or uses a weapon against her.<a href="#fn2">[2]</a></p>
+<p>He is busy at the same time with verbal strategies, humiliating, scapegoating, and threatening her. He tells her that she is stupid and disgusting, barely fit to be his servant; that she's lucky she's got him because no one else would have her, he's better than she deserves, any other man would treat her worse; that she needs him to make the rules and important decisions because she is incompetent and would botch everything; that she's responsible for his bad luck in life and therefore for his rages; that if she will prove that she loves him by treating him nicer and being more docile and obedient, he will change; that if she leaves, he will take the children away from her; that if she leaves, he will kill himself; that if she leaves, he will kill her.</p>
+<p>The wife, by this time in men's history having been almost genetically bred to be emotionally and mentally subservient to men, finds this view of herself and of her situation all too reasonable. She has deeply internalized this propaganda, is profoundly brainwashed to believe it all. So she placates, praises, pleads, and grovels. And denies the dangerousness of her situation.</p>
+<p>Her husband is cunning enough to intersperse his abuse with a reward or sop just often enough to reinforce her subservient behavior and keep her hopeful that he really <i>can</i>, that he really <i>will</i>, change. Though the reward is minute - he won't beat her tonight though she deserves it for letting the baby keep him awake - in her deprived condition it appears merciful and kind and evidence that she is behaving correctly, that, small reform by small reform, she can ultimately transform the whole relationship. She confides to the woman next door in a guilty moment that she can see some positive changes - after he beat her last time, for instance, he felt so bad that he gave her permission to take the car the next day to go see her mother.</p>
+<p>As grim as this is, it is only a surface picture. On a deeper level, her husband's terrorism interspersed with shows of repentance and humanity are forging a truly sinister bond - intense, wildly paradoxical, and adamant. Some understanding of why women under terror merge so completely with their torturers and so strongly resist awareness of men's perfidy and gynecidal intent helps explain why women as a class the world over bond with and support men's woman-hating, woman-destroying governments, institutions, values, ideologies, and cosmologies. Why, in short, we vote, go to church, believe in male gods, follow male gurus and channeled entities, attend and teach at universities, send our children to school, become lawyers and corporation servers, marry, and work for maledefined "women's rights."</p>
+<p>I have found particular clarification of our baffling behavior in the ongoing work of Dee L. R. Graham, Edna Rawlings, and Nelly Rimini, faculty in the Psychology Department at the University of Cincinnati. Their thesis is that we can expand our understanding of SHATTER, as well as the psychological reactions of battered women, by looking at a model called the Stockholm Syndrome.</p>
+<p>The Stockholm Syndrome is a construct developed to explain the strong emotional bonding of hostages and prisoners of war to their captors, and by feminist extension, of battered
+women to their terrorists. In <i>Loving to Survive</i>,<a href="#fn3">[3]</a> the authors cite four conditions necessary for this syndrome to develop: first (in the case of a battered woman), she must perceive the terrorist as having powers of life and death over her; second, she must believe that she cannot escape, that her life therefore depends on her captor; third, she must be isolated from outsiders so that his perspective is the only perspective available; and, fourth, she must feel as if her captor has shown her some kindness."<a href="#fn4">[4]</a></p>
+<p>When these conditions are met, she suffers what the authors term "traumatic
+psychological infantilism," a condition that "causes the victim to cling to the very person who is endangering her life."<a href="#fn5">[5]</a> In addition, the victim's recognition that her abuser holds the power of life and death over her, coupled with the awareness that he has - magnanimously it seems to her - allowed her to live, causes her to cleave to him in what is known as "traumatic bonding": she begins to view him as a "good guy," denying to herself (and others) how dangerous he is,<a href="#fn6">[6]</a> and opposing rescue.<a href="#fn7">[7]</a> In the Women's Movement, we call this phenomenon "seasoning."</p>
+<p>Seasoning, traumatic bonding, is incredibly strong. For it to take place, there must be not only a great imbalance in power but also "intermittent violence alternating with warm, friendly, kind behavior."<a href="#fn8">[8]</a> When this happens, and in the absence of other supportive relationships, the victim bonds to the supportive, positive aspect of her abuser.<a href="#fn9">[9]</a> (This helps explain why children of abusive parents often feel strong loyalties to them and do not wish to be separated.) A significant part of this bond (and of her bondage) is that she internalizes his world view,<a href="#fn10">[10]</a> sides with, and identifies with him - and imitates him.</p>
+<p>All women in patriarchy are long-term prisoners of war, perpetual hostages. Though we are no doubt in various stages of recovery, we are held fast in the Stockholm Syndrome. In this country, for instance, we have been more successfully isolated from one another than in any other - one woman to one individual guard and cell in the suburban nuclear family; our access to public space and to the outside world during one half of every day is limited and controlled by threat of rape; we are economically harassed and deprived - kept from getting decent jobs, made to plead for money from our husband the state, forced to accept an allowance from him; we are forced into prostitution and the sex industry, our sexuality used to sell everything under the sun; we are ground to dust by the courts, by religion, by industry, by schools, by art, by the very form and structure of the system, by every nail in its boot. And of course the shock troops daily hunt us down to torture and murder us.</p>
+<p>But underlying this picture that feminists have been calling into visibility for about 200 years is the still-hidden and steely bond forged by the system's life-and-death hold over us, by our perceiving no escape from it, our isolation from any alternative perspective or possibility, and our husband the state's maleficent, utterly designed, intermittent shows of "kindness" - <i>Roe v. Wade</i>, for instance.</p>
+<p>Women, in our marriage with the patriarchal state, present the classic features of traumatic psychological infantilism and of traumatic bonding. Our basic acceptance of male "reality" and of the necessity of our interacting with it every day is strongest proof that we have incorporated our torturing husband's world view. We believe his lies that we are incompetent and must therefore accept the world pretty much the way he has made it; that we cannot survive economically without him (whereas, in this slave culture, it is <i>he</i> who is economically dependent upon <i>us</i>); that he is basically a "good guy," the best we can get and we are lucky to have him; that he is the only one who can change our status; that we don't need to leave him because if we placate him, are docile, get permission, we can change him, and tiny reform by tiny reform we can build a happy marriage. We have evidence that our way of dealing with him is effective: after all, he's letting a handful of us do some of the high-status, low-integrity jobs men have always done.<a href="#fn11">[11]</a></p>
+<p>I have heard women involved in male politics say about our political system almost the same words I have heard battered women use about their abusers: "Of course our government isn't perfect, but where is there a better one? With all its faults, it is still the best system [husband] in the world." Like a battered wife, they never think to ask the really relevant question: who said we needed a husband, or a husband-state, <i>at all</i>?</p>
+<p>In terror that our husband the state will kill us or starve us if we try to leave, many feminists are resisting even the possibility of such a divorce and in classic terror-bonded behavior, are attacking those of us who urge it. But it is clear to me that, having bonded with monsters and their monstrous extension the system - ironically, for what we perceived as "safety" - we are clinging to a marriage that is lethal to women and to all life.</p>
+<p>Though we have so far followed the same pattern in the macrocosm as in the microcosm of patriarchy, there is great hope. After all, every day women free themselves of terrorist husbands. We understand something of what has to happen for them to be able to do this.</p>
+<p>Though every woman's experience is unique in many ways, there is a common
+denominator to them all: she changes how she perceives herself, how she feels about herself, in that relationship. She sets about her internal revolution, deprograms herself, and in the process breaks her dependency upon men's kindness. Whereas once she felt worthless and not deserving of better treatment, something spurs her to begin caring about herself and, most significantly of all, to begin putting herself <i>first</i>.</p>
+<p>Though that "something" is different with every woman, the results are similar. I remember Helen's story. Helen is a well-educated woman who, in an extremely abusive relationship with Fred for 13 years, displayed all the evidences of terror-bonding. One night she was in the emergency room at the local hospital again. As the doctors were putting her eyeball back into its socket, setting her broken shoulder, and sewing up the knife wounds all over her body, one of them who knew her well by this time said, "You know, Helen, the next time they bring you in here, I'm afraid we'll just have to tell them to wheel you right on through to the morgue."</p>
+<p>Suddenly, a crack appeared in the heretofore solid wall of her brainwashing. Through it she saw clearly for the first time that though Fred had always threatened to kill her if she left him, the truth was that he would kill her if she <i>stayed</i>. She awoke to her danger, and whereas before she had been afraid of leaving, now she began to feel far more afraid of <i>not</i> leaving. She realized that she wanted to live, that she wanted to be happy, that she didn't deserve this. She began to value her own life. Once she began to change significantly how she felt about herself everything else followed.</p>
+<p>Before her feelings about herself underwent transformation, asking herself "What shall I <i>do</i>?" was a useless exercise. Since she could not imagine herself doing other than she was doing, since she could not extrapolate a new reality in which she felt free as she stood in the middle of the old one in which she felt trapped, she could not imagine what behavior would get her from bondage to liberty. All she could answer when she asked herself "What shall I <i>do</i>?" was the same old conditioned answers: be nicer to him, try harder, show him you love him.</p>
+<p>What changed everything is that she saw and felt different, and from these different perceptions and feelings, she <i>became</i> different. From her new feelings -  present even nascently - of worthiness and lovableness began to come behavior she could never have predicted, never have imagined of herself, certainly never could have planned since she had never seen herself act self-respecting, self-loving, or worthy. There is no way she could have known what she would do if she felt that way before she actually watched herself doing it.</p>
+<p>An important part of the "everything else" that followed from or accompanied Helen's revolution was that she deprogrammed herself of her husband's lies, particularly those he told her about herself. She began to question all the assumptions that underlay her behavior, realized that they were all bogus, and that she had learned them from him. After his lies about <i>her</i>, for instance, his biggest lies had been about what would make <i>him</i> change and consequently what would change the marriage; she saw that he not only didn't change for the better but actively got worse when she behaved as he told her to. Her growing self-love and trust enabled her to push aside the scrims of deception with which he had shrouded their relationship and to begin to see it for what it really was.</p>
+<p>One of Helen's biggest revelations was that she couldn't change Fred, that she couldn't change anyone but herself. As soon as the fact took up firm residence in her emotional repertoire that she had no moral obligation even to <i>try</i> to change him, that she had no moral obligation to him at all, only a deep obligation to herself, she left the marriage.</p>
+<p>What happens to women like Helen individually in their marriages is happening globally among women as a group. It is called the Women's Liberation Movement and its enunciation is feminism. But whereas many women have left their microcosmic husbands and all their rules and demands, as a group we have yet to leave the partner of our macrocosmic marriage bed - the patriarchal state - and its imperatives, imperatives that are identical with those of its extensions and servants, the Freds of the world.</p>
+<p>What is our primary fear when we entertain the idea of leaving our husband the state? That he will kill us and destroy everything. Though the truth is, as it was with Helen and Fred, that he will kill us and destroy everything <i>if we stay</i>, like the battered women we are, we believe deeply that our presence, our pleading and begging, is what is keeping him from his ultimate destructiveness. Our conviction that if we stop fearing and monitoring him, he will go berserk, is such nonsense that it is clearly a deliberate part of our terror-based programming. He has gone berserk anyway. With our eyes pinned to his lapels day and night for thousands of years he has grown increasingly lunatic. With our eyes riveted upon him he has been killing us and the world around us since the day god became male. The evidence is that our behavior and our emotional and economic support has facilitated our monster husband the patriarchal state in all his manifestations throughout history.</p>
+<p>I mention economic support because one of women's most frequent objections to my suggestion that we stop resisting Fred the Fed and divorce him at once is that we must stay in order to stop him from building more, and more lethal, bombs. At this point, I remind my terrified sisters of the United Nations' statistic that confirms our slavery: women do two-thirds of the world's work, make one-tenth of the world's money, and own less than one-hundredth of the world's property. If we are doing most of the work and men are making nine-tenths of the money, it means that women are men's resources, that we are men's wealth - as the slaves' bodies and energy and labor and creativity and loyalty and emotional richness and culture are always the source of the master's wealth. Therefore our presence in patriarchy is absolutely necessary in order for men to have the wherewithal to do their war work, day by day. Our presence in this marriage makes possible men's bombs and tanks and guns and bullets and planes and ships. Our leaving this marriage, taking ourselves and all our abundance away from Fed Fred, is the fastest and surest way to stop his production of death machines.</p>
+<p>There are other economic considerations, women remind me. When Helen leaves Fred, chances are pretty good that she will plummet into poverty. This, they say, frightens women most, and I believe them. For this reason, whatever we do now must have as its foremost necessity establishing a firm, independent, economic base for women, and we are beginning to see how this might be done.<a href="#fn12">[12]</a></p>
+<p>I also remember that in the midst of terror, battered women cannot see their alternatives, though outsiders can. I think the same is true for women in patriarchy. In the midst of it, we think there are no alternatives. But if we could stand outside it for only a moment, we would see that we have many options. A handy measure in my life is that when I am <i>sure</i> there are no alternatives, I can be absolutely certain that I am listening to my conditioning. Regardless of how circumscribed the situation seems to be, there are <i>always</i> choices.</p>
+<p>If we want to know what will happen when women leave our husband the state, all we need to do is look at what happened when Helen left Fred. Nothing burst into flames; there was simply no marriage where one had been before. We can look high and low for Fred's ugly, vicious regime, his unjust, humiliating system of rules for that family, his institutions and traditions, but they are nowhere to be found. It takes two for sadism to exist.<a href="#fn13">[13]</a> Fred's and Helen's marriage required Helen; it simply ceased to exist when she left, and is gone forever.</p>
+<p>Andra Medea, internationally known expert on conflict, discovered this phenomenon through her comparative study of street and business fighting. In describing it, she concludes that in "dominance-oriented conflict" - conflict in which the aim of the attacker is to dominate the victim - interaction forms the key link. The attacker <i>must</i> have a response from the victim in order to go on; in fact, the attacker <i>craves</i> a response because the response solidifies his control.<a href="#fn14">[14]</a> A button I bought in the Crazy Ladies Bookstore in Cincinnati sums it up: "Power means not having to respond."<a href="#fn15">[15]</a></p>
+<p>"This sort of attacker can put on a tremendous display of power," Medea continues, "which is often no more than a mask for fundamental weakness. We see it all the time with abusive husbands: the awesome show of power hiding a basic fear and weakness... The abusive husband deeply needs the wife, the wife can typically do without the abusive husband."<a href="#fn16">[16]</a></p>
+<p>Medea also makes the point strongly that "the very nature of dominance-oriented attacks is to twist reality."<a href="#fn17">[17]</a></p>
+<p>When women leave patriarchy - when we untwist reality and realize that we do not have to respond to this system, just as the abused wife one day stops believing she has to work with her batterer or within the parameters he has set down and stops responding - patriarchy will simply cease to exist. It won't go up in smoke; it will disappear. It takes two groups to do tyranny: the tyrants and the slaves. Tyrants never stop doing tyranny until the slaves stop responding in the necessary way for tyranny to be done to them. When they stop, the game is up.</p>
+<p>I've been divorced twice in my life: once by a husband and once by a church. Before those divorces, I couldn't imagine what I'd do, how I'd live, without a husband, without a church. I couldn't believe that there were genuine alternatives. I was afraid of such enormous changes, afraid of trying to find a new nonconventional, nontraditional path, afraid of the pain of separation.</p>
+<p>But in neither case did the pain last long, and I slipped so easily and with such growing joy into other modes of thinking and being that now I am no longer the least afraid of divorce. This is fortunate since I am well along in my process of divorcing the abusive husband all women have in common, the patriarchal state. Gleefully and gladly I am throwing him out of my home, out of my bed, out of my mind, out of my heart - out of my life. As I deprogram myself of his lies, I see him as the weak fearful drunken blusterer he is, and I am not afraid of him anymore.</p>
+<p>Leaving our abusive husband-state seems risky to many women. It is hard to overcome the terror-produced belief that we are responsible for men's behavior and that if we stop being responsible, instant catastrophe will ensue. But since our best efforts to change them have only spurred them on, like Helen and all other battered women we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by simply walking out of this marriage, divorcing Fred the Fed, and with our sisters creating the world we want right now.</p>
+<p>I have come to the place in my spiritual development where anything less than this bores me unutterably. Recently a TV reporter asked me on a live news program what I thought of the 1988 Presidential candidates. I answered, "Oh, are they having another election? I don't know who's running but I <i>do</i> know what they're saying. I could write all their speeches myself - if I could keep awake long enough."</p>
+<p>"But you can't deny," he protested, "that whoever is elected will have power to affect your life."</p>
+<p>"Oh, but you're wrong. I can and do deny that those men have power," I countered. Though I hadn't time to explain it to him then, coming to that point in my thinking was a crucial step for me. It seems to me a step that any woman might take who is intent upon living in a new world now.</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> Although some women are in abusive relationships with other women, the model is the male/female relationship.</p>
+<p><a id="fn2">[2]</a> From the Power and Control Wheel produced by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, 206 West Fourth Street, Duluth, MN, 55806, (218) 722-4134.</p>
+<p><a id="fn3">[3]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, Edna Rawlings, and Nelly Rimini, <i>Loving to Survive: Battered Women. Hostages, and the Stockholm Syndrome</i>, a work in progress, Cincinnati, OH, p. 89. Some of this material has been published in K. Yllo and M. Bograd (Eds.), <i>Feminist Perspectives on Wife Abuse</i>. Sage: Beverly Hills, CA, 1988.</p>
+<p><a id="fn4">[4]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 3.</p>
+<p><a id="fn5">[5]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 4.</p>
+<p><a id="fn6">[6]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 5.</p>
+<p><a id="fn7">[7]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 2.</p>
+<p><a id="fn8">[8]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 6.</p>
+<p><a id="fn9">[9]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 6.</p>
+<p><a id="fn10">[10]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 4.</p>
+<p><a id="fn11">[11]</a> So that we won't ask ourselves such questions as: Do we enjoy these kinds of work? Do these jobs really need doing? Upon what values should we decide what work is necessary and useful? What is the most humane way of approaching any given task?</p>
+<p><a id="fn12">[12]</a> This is the subject of the last section of this book.</p>
+<p><a id="fn13">[13]</a> Though I acknowledge a Victim mode as one of women's programmed roles, I no longer speak of masochism at all. I am tired of men's self-serving analysis that women are in abusive relationships because we are masochistic by nature and want to be hurt. What they call masochism is a condition that could more accurately be called "frozen fright," "a hysterical, dissociative phenomenon characterized by numbness, or paralysis of affect" caused by perpetual terror (Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 4.)</p>
+<p><a id="fn14">[14]</a> Andra Medea, "Medea's Laws of Conflict," p. 9.</p>
+<p><a id="fn15">[15]</a> Ayofemi Stowe, in a performance piece called "Talking About Talking, the Power to Shape the World" that she wrote and performed with Robin Podolsky in 1987, also says something about the necessity of response to power: "When I was in Africa, I learned about the concept of Muntu. It says that every time you call a tree a tree, you reaffirm the power of that tree, the existence of the tree. I wonder if refusing to talk about the tree somehow diminishes the tree" (p. 12A).</p>
+<p><a id="fn16">[16]</a> Andra Medea, "Medea's Laws of Conflict," p. 5.</p>
+<p><a id="fn17">[17]</a> Andra Medea, "Medea's Laws of Conflict," p. 11.</p>

08_part2.html

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+<h1>Part 2</h1>
+<h2>CHALLENGING OUR ASSUMPTIONS</h2>

09_preface-to-part-2.html

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+<h1>Preface to Part II</h1>
+<p>Because our freedom depends on it, deprogramming ourselves from patriarchy's brainwashing is the single most crucial task before us. It is also the most difficult. To do it, we who have been a domesticated species for thousands of years must recover our wild minds, our thoroughly skeptical and irreverent facilities. We must ask ourselves at least a dozen times a day such questions as: Who said so? Who benefits from my thinking this? How does this thought or feeling keep me patriarchy's chattel? How has this idea kept the Women's Movement securely in men's hands?</p>
+<p>Asking myself that last question, for instance, enabled me some time ago to understand how the media determines the direction of our Movement. All day long the trumpets of patriarchy blare in our ears from every direction that the Women's Movement is about "ish-oos" - "women's ishoos." (You have to squinch your mouth into a tiny "o" to say "ishoos.") Although every so often women get the feeling that the Women's Movement is about something distinctly other than this, something immense and beautiful, the media's constant delineation of it as "ishoos" soon sets them straight again: what women <i>really</i> want is equal pay and child care.</p>
+<p>In this way patriarchy - particularly its media - has defined our Movement for us from the beginning. In this way we have been persuaded to pay attention to the things that would make least change in the status quo, concentrate our energies on areas that could not be seriously restructured until more basic shifts in values were made. Equal pay for equal work, for example, is a true impossibility in an exchange system; child care can never be restructured satisfactorily for mothers in patriarchy. Our focus on the red herring of "ishoos" has caused us to see ourselves small and blurry in a small and blurry Movement, like a bad snapshot taken from a distance.</p>
+<p>For years I have known that everything that men have told us is true is in fact false, if not in an obvious then in a devious, sneaky way, like "ishoos." Nevertheless, recognizing any of the hundreds of implanted and false assumptions underlying everything I think and do every day has been the hardest labor of my life.</p>
+<p>In Part II, I offer some of the insights I have gathered as I have tried to question every aspect of my heretofore automatic belief system. It is irrelevant to me whether they are "right" or "wrong." What <i>is</i> important is that they give me another perspective, they broaden the possibilities, they encourage wildness and creativity in me. These - the untamed, inspired mind and will-are what I value. The <i>habit</i> of not accepting anything out of an unexamined faith in someone else's world view - this is what I cherish.</p>
+<p>As each of us tells the others the foolishness we have ferreted out of our own minds, we encourage this habit in our species. This Part is intended as a contribution to women's quick recovery of the habit of wild, inventive thought and action.</p>