Trying to explain to reporters in 30 seconds or fewer why I no longer believe men have power is, of course, impossible. Even if I were to spend hours explaining why men's defining power and their defining it as external together expose a mammoth deception, they would not take me seriously. As far as they are concerned, men's having the power on our world is a cultural given, and to suggest otherwise is to indulge in semantic hocus-pocus.
+But the feminist process of discovering in ourselves, and of disentangling from, every venerable premise of global male culture is unlike any other emancipation, and sometimes does resemble magic. Looking back into time as far as we can see, we find no evidence of any people who had to start from scratch in establishing a new world mind as women are now having to do. We may not always know what to do to bring this world into being, but we have been getting a clearer idea all the time of what is not useful, of what not to do.
+Scrutinizing language has been part of this effort from the first. When we deal with language, we engage with symbol, the strongest magic. Feminists understand that one of the subterfuges by which men came to own the world was by appropriating language, embedding messages in it that justified their tyranny and by doing so, literally changing the face of reality. Although we try to be exceedingly cautious and on guard as we use their languages, they are so studded with word-mines that with every thought we think, internal explosions threaten our tenuous new reality, our tender budding self-love. If we are not careful, we find ourselves assuming that language's sly, subliminal memos report the one and only possible way to see the world. We then not only believe those messages but act on them.
+Such a classified memo is the word "power," another concept about which men have set the limits of feminist debate. We often end up trying to make distinctions between "power-over" - which we perceive as mascu-linist - and "power-with" or "power-to" - to women a tamer form of the unruly concept. But what we have rarely done is ask ourselves why we accepted any part of men's definition of power in the first place.
+Power is a confusing concept only if we assume that men have defined it disinterestedly - a pernicious assumption advocated by the guys who brought us a system founded on lies.
+I often hear feminists speak of "the men in power," and until recently used that phrase often myself. But one day as I went to say it, it stuck in my throat.
+"Who says men have power?" a voice inside me demanded.
+"Why, they say so," I answered.
+"Who benefits from the belief that what men say is power is power?" the voice insisted.
+"They benefit, of course," I said.
+"What an extraordinary coincidence," the voice mused.
+Such a suspicious coincidence, in fact, that it turned my thinking in quite another direction.
+Underlying all my deprogramming myself of patriarchal dogma is the assumption that nothing men have said is true - at least in the way they said it was; that their view of reality, past and present, is relentlessly warped and twisted and, most often, just flat-out wrong. Not understanding the basic principles of life and love that underlie everything, they cannot be assumed to have understood anything.
+Thinking this over, I realized that since men own the language and can name their hankypanky whatever they wish, obviously they have always tried to name it something highly politic, something with terrific propaganda force. When they cunningly chose "power," we believed them. Then, looking at the behavior they called powerful and noticing right away that we didn't act like that, we concluded that we were powerless. Consequently, we felt powerless.
+But men's insistence that they have power is not only classic patriarchal reversal but also wishful thinking. They are experts at creating a reality by "acting as if." Contrary to their propaganda and to the common belief it produced, men do not have power. Patriarchy is a philosophy and a regime of infinite weakness.
+The only way men could ever have been regarded as powerful is by doing what they did - stealing the language and naming weakness "power," defining power as ownership and control of others, as the holding of slaves by incalculable violence and terrorism, as the willingness to destroy life.
+Patriarchy's basis in violence and death is proof of its weakness, if any is needed. Violence is the offspring of weakness, spawned by emotional neediness, feelings of insecurity and powerlessness, worthlessness and fear. It is an indication not of strength of character but rather of a fateful characterological defectiveness. Because of its weakness, patriarchy is now dying in its infancy, a mere 5,000 years old and some say even younger. In contrast, women's culture flourished for at least 200,000 years.
+Patriarchy is weak and nongenerative because it is reactionary through and through. Arising from opposition to women's world, it sprang from profoundly negative impulses, from motives of hatred and revenge, from a lust to destroy all that was womanly and creative of life, all, that is, that was powerful. It continues on this bent. Corruption cannot beget power.
+Power is the generative, positive stuff of life, and because integrity is its source, it cannot destroy or hurt or limit or debase. Power is what women have and always have had. We have always been the generative, positive people on this planet, which is why men have had to redefine and obfuscate the true nature of power.
+Since genuine power stems from integrity and can exist only in the presence of integrity, women cannot possibly have power in men's misogynist system (and of course men, being misogynist, cannot have power either). Engagement with the system is for women a profound betrayal of self.
+I look out upon the world men have made - their legislatures, courts, churches, schools, art, architecture, their politics, their economics - and I don't see anything I would have done as they have done it. Not one single thing. Their system does not reflect me at all, neither my mode of being in the world nor my world view; rather, it is inimical to all I love, all I desire, all I am. Its every aspect pains me to look at, to think about; it hurts me on all levels of my life; it is not my home.
+To me this means that in reality I am excluded from patriarchy not by the fact of men's control but by my own women's values, my own perspectives, my own female way of being human in the world. These values, these perspectives, these ways make patriarchy alien to me and to all women, put us psychically, emotionally, and spiritually outside their system.
+Outside their system, then, is where we genuinely live and have our being; any other notion is pure illusion. Since we can only be authentic, wholly and truly ourselves outside their system, only outside can we have integrity - and, therefore, power.
+This is perhaps the most important feminist fact I know, that integrity is the source of all power, that power comes from loyalty to one's best self. We cannot have power in men's system because we cannot be true to our best selves there. We cannot have power in men's system because in order to be in it at all we must be like them-think like them, act like them, be junior men. In a win/lose paradigm, a dominance-oriented conflict, such as patriarchy, "whoever imitates, loses."[1]
+Because women can never really be part of the Old Boys' Club no matter what positions they hold, what their presence in systemic structures does is to provide for other women a model of powerlessness and betrayal of self. Their presence there says that the best way to be a woman is to try to be a man, to deny that we are different, to be too cowardly to say, "All this is purest humbug!" Their imitative behavior shouts the message that men's world view and their ways are not only okay but preferable. Because their torture-induced need for approval from men and their system is greater than the need for approval from themselves, they model slavery to their sisters. They are deeply dependent, deeply servile in ways that their superficial "liberation" masks.
+But simply by being female, we are, whether we are aware of it or not, in the truest sense outside their system at any given moment, and therefore can have incredible power right now. All we need do is understand and believe that this is true and not be afraid to take our power.
+And stop renouncing it in favor of male control, which is exactly what we do. I learned the logistics of this control give-away in the microcosm of my own patriarchal home,[2] in my own kitchen.
+Several years ago, when my third child was 17, he and I had a typical parent-teenager clash in the kitchen one night, one of a great many throughout his adolescence, this time about drugs. He stormed downstairs to his room and slammed the door, leaving me standing in the middle of the room feeling wretched and powerless.
+Even having already reared two adolescents, I had no more idea how to get the present one to do what he should than I had had with the first two. The task seemed impossible. I had lived in terror for years - terror that they would be unhappy, that they would do drugs, that they would self-destruct - and doing everything I could think of to prevent these disasters had neither lessened the terror nor changed their behavior. Although the first two had made it through somehow, I wasn't at all sure if or how my actions had helped or hindered those outcomes, and the trial-and-error of it had nearly undone me. I couldn't imagine, standing there that night, how I was going to live through two more adolescents.
+Suddenly, I began to feel very angry - in my experience always a first sign of returning health. I realized that I was furious at the anguish I had suffered so long as a mother and the misery that seemed still to stretch so endlessly before me. I felt as if I couldn't wait to be happy until all my kids were over 30 and safe (besides, mothers of over-30s had told me that their kids were still never safe); I'd been the best mother I'd known how to be for over 20 years, and I deserved to be happy. What's more, I deserved it now! I was nearly 50 years old. When had I thought I was going to begin?
+Then, thinking of my tyrant son sulking down in his room, and feeling an unaccustomed invulnerability, a new firmness at the center, I thought, "That kid can go to hell in a handbasket! I would be sorry, because I love him and I don't intend to stop loving him. And I'll do what I can to prevent it-but not like before. I can't live his life for him; I can't make him do what I want him to do. He's just going to have to decide for himself whether he's going to self-destruct or not, and I'm going to have to be happy no matter what he decides."
+I felt as if I had been holding his heel as he hung upside down over the abyss. One cannot live one's own life while holding someone else's heel. I decided I needed to love myself first and be true to myself, do what was best for me, assuming that whatever is best for me is +best for everyone around me.
+Though I didn't understand for a long time the scope of my change that night, and though I still had much work to do to make that change permanent, looking back what is clear is that I was finally beginning to understand the dynamics of how women give our power to men. I was getting hold of a basic principle of power, that when we make our feelings of well-being or security or safety dependent upon someone else's behavior, we hand them the opportunity, even the invitation, to destroy us.
+I realized that night that I would never have control of my life if I continued to make my internal climate contingent upon whether or not my children or anyone else outside me did what I wanted them to do. As long as I did, I would live in perpetual terror that they would not take care of my feelings. I would always be trying to change them so they would act in a way that would make me feel secure and happy. It had become unmistakably clear in that flash that because I couldn't control anyone or change anyone but myself, it was emotional suicide to put the responsibility for my happiness in someone else's hands.
+In some inchoate way that night, I knew that I had to hold all the responsibility for my feelings in my own hands or I would never be safe or free, that otherwise I would always be manipulatable, out of my own control, always at someone else's mercy. Since no one can care about me as much as I care about myself, I would always get hurt, sometimes very badly. If I continued in this vulnerable, powerless mode, having four children would mean staying hooked up to four conduits to agony for the rest of my life. I felt as if I would die if I continued in the old way.
+Without knowing exactly what I was doing, but for the sake of survival, I detached myself from my children then as sources of well-being for me, took the responsibility away from them, where I couldn't control it, back into myself where it belonged. At the same time I realized, momentarily at least, that I was not responsible for any other person's well-being or security or safety either;[3] that there comes a time when we must each learn to put our own lives first, realize that no one else can or will or should consistently bear the burden of making us feel safe and loved, and find our source of satisfaction and safety within ourselves. In any other thinking, disaster looms.
+That night in my kitchen these ideas were largely still feelings - strong, internalized feelings of love for myself and a dedication to my own happiness, the basis of integrity. With these feelings full upon me, without thinking of a plan, without asking "What shall I do?" I went down and confronted my son. I have no idea what I said; there is a limited repertoire in such situations. Certainly I didn't say or do anything I hadn't said or done a dozen times before. I couldn't have put into words the change I'd just gone through enough to articulate it to myself let alone to him.
+The difference was in how I was. The instant he reluctantly opened his door to me, he knew the old game was over. He knew he was standing in the presence of New Mom, mom who could not be manipulated or bullied, a woman in her power. Regardless of what his ears were picking up, all his antennae were quivering with the message that had become a part of my being, of my aura: I had let go of his heel. He knew without conscious thought that whether or not he plunged to his death in the abyss below or decided to change his course was now entirely up to him. I was handing him back the responsibility for his life.
+Overnight - and I do not mean that metaphorically; I mean literally overnight, between the night of October 16 and the morning of October 17 - the chronic disquiet in our home disappeared. My son's life changed dramatically in the direction I had been trying to get it to change for years, and it has stayed changed. Of course, he could have chosen to selfdestruct, though most people, given the responsibility and the choice, do not. But even if he had made that choice, I would have been all right. I would have grieved terribly, but my heart's fire would not have been extinguished with guilt as it would once have been. Grief softens and dims with time, but guilt is eternally sharp and glittery bright. (A part of us does not survive the guilt patriarchy reserves for mothers.)
+When women make our well-being, our feelings of security and safety, dependent upon whether or not the system is amenable to us, whether or not the men who control this world behave as we believe they must for us to be "all right" - if they stop building bombs, if congress passes the right bills, if Bork is kept off the Supreme Court; in short, if we think we can't be happy until the men change, we invite them to hurt us, give them control over our innermost reality, put the responsibility for our lives in their weak, violent hands. When we make our internal state contingent upon their behavior-behavior we can neither control nor change - we give up all chance for independence and freedom, and ultimately, we give up all chance for life. Because we are the only ones we can change and control, we must depend upon ourselves for freedom. We must use our mighty power now to create a home for ourselves and all other living things.
+Someone is sure to say at this juncture, "Well, that's pretty rhetoric, but if men don't have power, why can they still rape us, still beat us, still impoverish us? Call it what you will, it looks like power to me!"
+Alix Dobkin, Susan Horwitz, and I were talking one afternoon at Wiminfest in Albuquerque. Alix had recently returned from Australia and New Zealand, and was still intoxicated with the women she'd met and the stories she'd heard there. Three of the stories were about authentic power, women's power, the power that comes from within.
+In a small frontier town in Australia there is a group of women who meet often to be together and do womanly things. Though they never announce publicly when or where they will meet, a group of dangerous red-necks in the town frequently discover this information - perhaps they sense it in their threatened gonads - and arrive on the scene to harass them, seriously harass them.
+One night as they were meeting, the women heard the men pull up in a pick-up outside, spill out, and come clanking with their spurs and guns, all liquored up, their talk vulgar and boisterous, into the building. When the men entered the room where the women were, they found the women sitting on the floor each with her eyes locked into the woman's eyes opposite her in the circle, silently and deeply looking into another woman's eyes, totally focused on one another.
+The men, who expected to be met with terror and pleading, couldn't get their bearings. They milled about with much bravado for awhile, but as the women's focus held, they grew quieter and finally shuffled out, got in the pick-up, and drove away.
+This is power.
+Another night when the women were meeting, the men came again and parked themselves outside the door, shooting off their guns, brandishing big sticks, trying to terrorize the women as they waited for them to come out. Which the women did - in single file, humming. Such refusal to be afraid, such certainty of their own power, such centeredness, totally befuddled the mob, and they parted and let the women through.
+This is power.
+On another evening, the men came and left, promising to return. So each woman sat and envisioned how she wanted the evening to go. One of the members of the group arrived late, explaining that she had had difficulty getting around the men's pick-up, which had overturned down the road!
+This is power, and it comes from within, from how we feel about ourselves, from believing that we are powerful and that anyone who has to control others by violence is weak and fearful and simply no match for us. Power comes from not viewing ourselves as vulnerable, as victims, as at men's mercy. When enough of us access this power within ourselves, no woman, even the most terrorized, will be rapable, beatable, assaultable, or impoverishable.
+Men call this "magical thinking" in an attempt to discredit it. Anything that men want to discredit interests me enormously. Why would they bother to notice it or to name it at all, to say nothing of going out of their way to pour calumny upon it, if it were simply harmless and stupid? Who does it benefit for recognition of a different mode of being in the world to be written off as "magical thinking?" If all people realized the extent of their personal power, no one could control anyone else. I believe it is a natural law that power - to create and to protect creation - springs from within, from our beliefs and feelings. Men have had to blind and deafen and numb us to our immense powers in order to keep us under control. Surely this is the way they took over the world. Let us be advised.
+Some soul, desperate to preserve the old belief and feeling, as we have all been taught to do, might say at this point, "You may not believe men have power, but women can't have babies without them, and this is a definite power men have over women."
+I'm so glad that this imaginary desperate soul brought that up. It reminds me of another story Alix told us that day in Albuquerque. She said that one of the aboriginal cultures in Australia is reputed to be the oldest living society in the world. In that community, women are greatly respected and very influential. They have many of their own rituals, rituals it is literally unthinkable that the men could intrude upon. In the myth of this group, and basic to the women's feelings about themselves, basic to their power, is a story of the long time, the ages and ages, when only women lived on this earth. Obviously, these people have no illusions about the necessity of men to the continuation of the species.
+"But," my hypothetical desperate soul may say, "even if the story is true - and it can't be - that was then. Parthenogenesis doesn't happen these days."
+But maybe it does. Ruth Barrett told me at the National Women's Music Festival in Bloomington in June 1988 that doctors admit that about one in every 10,000 births is parthenogenic, and if doctors give a number on such a subject, we know it has to be a low estimate. Earlier that week a woman in Albuquerque told me that a great deal of research had been done on the subject at Berkeley in the 60s and 70s and that it was either forced to go underground or has been destroyed. I have asked Ruth to let me know if she ever runs into a woman who claims to be pregnant by parthenogenesis or to have given birth to a child so conceived.
+Since true power moves from the inside out, parthenogenesis makes soundest sense.
+As more and more women find our power and experiment with living in it, however, we would do well to remember how frightened oppressed people become when some of their group break through to freedom, how well-trained all women have been to clamp the fetters around the ankles of any of our kind who give signs of escaping. If we remember that women have been prisoners of war for millennia, we will be more understanding and forgiving of one another when, in our terrorbond with patriarchy, we try to destroy one another.
+At the same time, of course, we must not let anyone's fear of our power make us also afraid of it or distract us from practicing how to live in it more fully every day. We would be wise to remember that sometimes when women are in their own power, acting with the authority that comes from within - an alien mode in patriarchy and one that enrages some other women (a rage that I believe stems from terror) - they are denounced as demagogues and told that they are leading women astray.
+The positive side of such behavior is that it gives us important information about the denouncers. First, it tells us that the frightened ones are tempted themselves by the ideas and world view and mode of power of the women they fear, that they are tempted to divorce their most cherished beliefs, the ones from which they get greatest reward-their view of themselves as victims, for instance, or as "partners" of men-and are terrified by these feelings of disloyalty to their captors. Second, it tells us that they fear that all women who come within the strong women's ken will be similarly tempted and may succumb, in which case the torturers will kill them all. Third, it says that because they do not trust themselves, they do not trust other women; otherwise they would not view women as unthinking sheep who can be led any which way by women who dare be their fully powerful selves. Fourth, it exposes their fear of women's being powerful in one another's presence, the fear that we can neither withstand nor cope with genuine power, only with control, and it says that they are afraid of their own power. Fifth, it reveals that they do not love themselves because if they did, they would not be threatened by women's diversity and could stop trying to control women, could let them each be who and where they are in their journeys whether they agree with them or not.
+Any woman who other women are trying to pull out of her power through the widening cracks in her programming back again into men's dead world must of course simply continue on her course, growing in her ability to access and live in her power moment by moment. None of us needs worry about leading other women into error. Women are neither stupid nor sheep, and certainly will not follow other women blindly. We can all be trusted to take from one another what we find useful, think over any new possibilities that interest us, and leave the rest.
+Being, without compunction, as powerful as we know how to be among one another - in women's way, from within, the way that does not weaken others - each of us gives other women permission to practice being amazing to themselves. But this is incidental. Paramount is the fact that by doing so we fulfill our responsibility to ourselves. For example, for my own sake, I always give the most persuasive, most impassioned speeches of which I am capable, letting my power rise and fill me utterly, enjoying myself and the strong women in the audience so much that I haven't room to worry about the extremely unlikely possibility that I will lead any of them astray.
+But I do keep a closer watch over my language than I have done before, remembering that words create reality. I know that if I were to say "the men in power," I would give the women hearing me the message that I acceded to that lie, and I would again reinforce my own former illusion that because what men have is power, women are powerless.
+Now when someone wants a comment from me about "the men in power" and their current mischief, I say, "So the men in weakness are setting up another futile meeting in Geneva (or wherever), you say? You say the men in weakness are bombing, raping, torturing, murdering, pillaging, and laying waste? Ho hum. What else is old?"
+Then I tell them what's new: "The women in power today are recreating themselves and all society. The women in power today are breaking free of fear of men's weakness, free of the necessity for men's approval and 'kindness,' free of the patriarchal imperative that we must change men, getting them to do for us what must be done, free of the lie that we cannot do it ourselves. The women in power today know not only that the men in weakness cannot change the world, but that it is women who are rising in every race, every class, every nation of the world to decide the course of human events, the fate of all life. The women in power today are forming communities around the earth, establishing a new economic base, a new order of plenty and peace. The women in power, in genuine power - that's us, and that's what's new."
+ +[1] Andra Medea, "Medea's Laws of Conflict," p. 4.
+[2] All homes are patriarchal until we get patriarchy out of our minds and souls.
+[3] Anyone over the age of 16, that is.
diff --git a/11_chap5.html b/11_chap5.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ae36ae9 --- /dev/null +++ b/11_chap5.html @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +And that's all that's new. So every time we say the words "newspapers" and "evening news" - let alone actually read their pages and watch them on the TV screen - we fortify the assumption necessary to patriarchy that men have power, that they are doing something new, that they are changing things, that the system is dynamic, alive, fresh, real. Those words reconfirm our fears that because what feminists are doing is not in the "news," we are not doing anything new or vital, not making any difference, that we have no power, that we are not important.
+When we stop to think about it, we know that none of this is true. We know that, contrary to the promotion hook in the word "news," patriarchy is obsolete, stagnant, weak and false.
+One glance at what men call newspapers confirms this. There is nothing in them from front to back that we couldn't have predicted. Any one of us, if required, could sit down at a desk and create a most plausible "newspaper" from scratch. Why? Because there is absolutely nothing new in any of them whatever. Patriarchy, like the senile system it is, merely repeats itself endlessly, mumbles the same old formula for success: bigness, control, winning, money, status, fear, hatred, scarcity, violence.
+I am not willing deliberately to reinforce my self-hatred by lying to myself with words such as these that I know are harmful to me. So when I must, I speak of the oldspapers and the evening olds, keeping my imagistic mind as free of manipulative clutter as possible.
+I no longer subscribe to or read oldspapers or olds magazines or watch or listen to the olds on TV or radio. I know that women are the only ones with the power to do anything new in the world, the only creative people now on earth. Women's world is just being born, men's is dead and lies around us rotting, waiting for us to bury and forget it. This is still so hard for me to remember, to internalize, and to feel that I take great care not to subvert my delicate new consciousness by slipping comfortably into my former language, laden as it is with false assumptions.
+Those who think this is a silly notion need only ask themselves how many women they know have stopped reprogramming themselves with self-hate and powerlessness every day by refusing to read the oldspapers or watch the evening olds; they are the neighbors, friends, kin of those who pooh-pooh such behavior. Everywhere I go I meet such women, some of whom would not dream of calling themselves feminists. But they are women of our time. They are tired of feeling vulnerable and victimized, and they have come to the end of toleration of men's weakness and stupidity parading as power and brilliance. They tell me that it bores them and they don't care how politically incorrect that sounds to others.
+Me either.
diff --git a/30_ata.html b/30_ata.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..00bd6e9 --- /dev/null +++ b/30_ata.html @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Although she received her doctorate from Rutgers in 1965, Sonia Johnson is prouder of her 1979 graduation summa cum laude from the Mormon church, the world's foremost university for patriarchal studies.
+Catapulted overnight into national prominence, she became a radical feminist, agitating, writing, and establishing a reputation for being one of the great orators of our time. Since her excommunication, she has been speaking professionally at colleges and universities and for a wide variety of organizations and groups.
+Her first book, From Housewife to Heretic, the story of the excommunication, was published by Doubleday in 1980 and has now been reissued by Wildfire Books. Her second, Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation, a revolutionary theory of change, was published in 1987 by The Crossing Press.