Lesbian cartoonist and brilliant graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel articulated what has come to be known  as the Bechdel Test. It's from her brilliant and long-running cartoon strip "Dykes to Watch Out For." Two lesbians are on their way to the movies, and one of them says, "I have this rule, see.... I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it... who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man."

There is actually a website, where folks can rate movies according to their ranking on the Bechdel Test.
 
Well, the recent release of a lesbian-themed Hollywood movie, The Kids Are All Right, has inspired me to propose a lesbian adjunct to the Bechdel Test. Let’s call it the Lesbian Litmus…

Okay, here goes... To pass the Lesbian Litmus, a film about lesbians must have:

1)  Butch parity.  For every lesbian femme character there is a lesbian butch. Not a transgender male. Not a butchy femme. A lesbian butch. This was an ongoing struggle for "The L-Word."

3)    No “all she needs is a good man.” (The Fox, The Kids Are All Right, The Children’s Hour, Chasing Amy, Kissing Jessica Stein) No “give me a baby” sex.  (French Twist)  And, help me if I’m forgetting any.

4)    No killing off of the lesbian to make it okay (Boys on the Side, The Fox, The Killing of Sister George, original ending of Maedchen in Uniform, Thelma and Louise... who can only justify their lesbian kiss with the fact they are going to be ruptured and shattered cadavers seconds after.) 

5) It shouldn't be necessary for the women to be drunk/high. The lesbianism shouldn't be accidental or dismissable because of having been drunk, but clearly chosen. (Claire of the Moon) (Thank you, Karen Escovitz!)

6) The lesbian sex scenes should not be outnumbered or outclassed by heterosex scenes (The Kids Are All Right)  (Thanks, again, Karen!)

7)    AND NO SEX SCENES WRITTEN OR DIRECTED BY SOME IDIOT WHO STILL CAN’T ACCEPT OR IMAGINE THAT WE DO JUST FINE WITHOUT A PENIS, WITHOUT MALE PORNOGRAPHY, WITHOUT WINDCHIMES, WITHOUT VAMPIRES, WITHOUT INEBRIATION, WITHOUT SUICIDE, AND ESPECIALLY WITHOUT PANDERING TO SOME INTERNALIZED MALE PORNOGRAPHIC GAZE. OKAY?

So that’s my proposed “Lesbian Litmus.”

The Bechdel Test seems to eliminate about half of the big studio films. The Lesbian Litmus looks to me like it will take out about half of the lesbian films. The more assertive lesbians and feminists become the more rarified the cinematic atmosphere… 

And now I am going to suggest The Gage Gauge:

The lesbians who are in a primary relationship express an understanding that their intimacy poses a tremendous threat to male dominant institutions, and they derive both pleasure and energy from this understanding and, because of this, seek out opportunities to maximize the radical potential of their lesbianism.

Now, surely, somewhere there must be a lesbian film that ranks on the Gage Gauge…?  If not, may I suggest any number of Gage plays for future filmmaking projects? www.carolyngage.com

 

I want to say something serious about Lindsay Lohan. 

She tried to be in a public lesbian relationship at the same time that Hollywood was claiming her as a heterosexual sex goddess. Nobody has ever done that before.  And she pulled off one of the most remarkable portrayals of an incest victim ever seen on screen.

She was trashed and ridiculed for the lesbian relationship. Her girlfriend was given insulting nicknames by gossip columnists.  Her father expressed his homophobia openly to the press. And while she was going through all this, she was struggling very publicly with drug and alcohol addiction. The gossip-mongers reveled in every careless crotch shot, every drunken stumble. She was called “Lindsanity” and “Fire Crotch” and “LOLhan.” Her girlfriend’s admirable loyalty to her, even after the breakup, through DUI's, rehab, and up to the current jail sentence has been treated as a joke.

The film about incest was trashed by the critics and buried as quickly as it opened. The press was far more interested in Lohan’s unpredictable behavior on the set, which very closely mirrored Marilyn Monroe’s behaviors on the set of her last picture, The Misfits… and probably for the same reason: Both actresses were playing very close to home, bringing a  dangerous level of integrity to their roles as violated women fighting for their lives in real-life environments that offered inadequate support.

Georgia Rule was the film, and it featured Jane Fonda as the grandmother, Felicity Huffman as the mother, and Lohan as the teenaged daughter. In the film, Lohan’s unruly, sexually promiscuous character has been sent to live with her grandmother, a woman with old-fashioned values and methods of discipline. Turns out the girl is a handful because her stepfather has been raping her, and her mother does not believe her. As many child victims do, the daughter has recanted her accusations, because her mother’s denial of the abuse is more painful than her rejection of her daughter for lying … and, of course, after retraction, the acting out began. The victimized daughter tells the story, as so many of us have done, in ways that make up in drama for what they lack in directness.

This week, the Department of Veteran Affairs announced some good news. They are reforming the rules for claiming veterans’ benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  The military is easing the burden of proof that has been required for veterans seeking this diagnosis.  No longer do they have to have witnesses, documentation, etc. regarding the incident that caused the trauma. Now, all they need is a VA-approved psychologist or psychiatrist to affirm that the vet’s trauma story is “consistent with the places, types, and circumstances of the Veteran's service.”

The bad news is that these new rules will not apply to veterans (mostly women) whose PTSD is a result of  have experienced Military Sexual Trauma (MST).

I’ve been trying to figure out why this is. Maybe it has something to do with how the military defines the situation… 

There comes a time when every tyrant overplays his hand. He gets cocky. What began as a hidden agenda becomes explicit. His carefully masked contempt for his followers erupts into an inflammatory public display of loathing. After years of chafing under the constriction of his own propaganda machine, he exults in casting off the last concessions to human decency. The grandiosity which began as an undeveloped defense against abysmally low self-esteem has been buttressed, rampart by rampart, by the arrogance and entitlement of patriarchal structures, until it has become the armature of a personality, the substitute for a soul.

This moment does not arrive unheralded. There are warnings along the way—shocking encroachments, unguarded moments, slips, near-misses. These are covered up, excused. There are phony apologies, scapegoats, favors called in, threats. Each time that there is a close call where the followers have the opportunity to glimpse the man behind the curtain, but where they fail to interpret correctly what they are seeing and fail to respond appropriately, the tyrant grows more confident, his ego more distended.

Sometimes, the peak of hubris is preceded by a near brush with self-awareness, a close call with accountability... a notable move in the right direction... and then, like a rubber band stretched taut, the backlash into grandiosity: the moment—the spectacle—of full-blown, unmistakable self-revelation. No more disguises, no more concessions. A display of raw power and virulent hatred.

That moment has arrived for Mel Gibson, and it has arrived for Pope Benedict XVI. And for each of them, this moment was preceded by what appeared to be the beginning of sanity.

In Mel’s case, there was his DUI, his sexist and anti-Semiitic rant, the mug shot... followed by an apology, an admission of "belligerent behavior" and "despicable" remarks." There was even a stint in outpatient rehab.

It was short-lived sanity. This week, there has been a public disclosure of a series of verbally violent phone calls to his girlfriend, with whom he is co-parenting a baby girl. The phone calls appear to acknowledge a physical assault. The language is racist, pornographic, and deeply misogynist. He may not have known his calls were being taped, but most celebrities of Gibson’s caliber would have exercised some vigilance to protect their assets and their reputation. This time,  there are no apologies, no rehab. This time there are counter-attacks, a  retaliatory restraining order. This time there is no excuse.

And what about Pope Benedict XVI? This is the same pope who went to Africa with the message that condoms increase the spread of AIDS. This is the same man who sent a confidential letter to every bishop in the Catholic church  in 2001, reminding them of the strict penalties for going to the police with allegations of sexual abuse. This is the man who urged these bishops to investigate these cases “in the most secretive way… restrained by perpetual silence… under penalty of excommunication.”

And yet... and yet... There was that moment of seeming sanity. In June, the Pope finally made an apology that appeared sincere. He spoke of his shame and sorrow to the victims. From St. Peters itself, he begged forgiveness from God and from the victims... and he promised to do "everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again." Wow...  asking forgiveness...?  "Everything possible...?" That sounds like some serious change. But, as with Mel, it was just enough of a taste of reality, of right-sizedness, of accountability, to send him scampering back into the fortress of infallibility.

n light of these omissions, it is most likely that this speeded-up, in-house trial procedure is intended to facilitate cover-ups, rather than result in justice for the victims.

These Vatican revisions are a huge F-you to the thousands of victims and their families… as well as to the faithful members of the Church who drop their hard-earned wages in the collection plate every Sunday, and who have had to bankroll the settlement of these child abuse cases to the tune of several billion dollars. They can now understand that their donations will continue to enable  crimes against children and protection of perpetrators. The Vatican has decided that, steep as these settlements are, they are still more expedient than turning the criminals over to the police. Because, of course, the safety of the children is not factored in. The cost-benefit analysis is all about loss of prestige vs. cost of protecting prestige.

Okay, that’s blatant enough, but, in a breath-taking display of hubris, the Vatican revisions go one better than their “stay the course” policy on protecting pedophiles. They lump the ordination of women priests in with the raping of children. That’s right. Recognizing the spiritual commitment of women who feel called to the priesthood is considered by the Vatican to be as heinous and as morally bankrupt, as damaging, and as dangerous as raping a child. Wow. The Church will deal as harshly with ordainers of women as they will pedophilic criminals. Well, actually, more harshly. Because, of course, they protect the pedophiles.

Honestly, it does take my breath away. I don’t know why, because this is the Church that brought us the witch-burnings and the Inquisition, that murdered people for reading the Bible in English, that tortured Galileo for attempting to explain Copernican theory...  The church that banned divorce, abortion, birth control. The church that, in the brilliant words of Stephen Frye (yes, check out his speech!) is run by "extraordinarily sexually dysfunctional people" who label gays and lesbians perverts. Really, nothing they do or say should surprise me. But this did.It really took my breath away. Women consecrated to spiritual leadership are on a par with child rapers. Wow.

The cards are all face up on the table now. For Mel and for the Pope.

Mel Gibson’s ex-wife has come forward to support her husband. She is supporting him, even though he left her for a younger woman, left her after nearly three decades of marriage and seven children. Left her after her standing by him through the DUI, through allegations of infidelity, through all the controversy around his bizarre religious practices. She wants the world to know that there was never any physical abuse in the marriage, that he was a wonderful husband and father. She tells us she is coming forward for the sake of her children. In other words, she is protecting what is left of her investment in those three decades.

Will the women of the Catholic Church, including the mothers of  potential rape victims, also want to protect their investment? Will they be remembering the cherished rituals and rites of the Church, their hours of devoted service, the relationships and the community of the Church?  Will they be willing to overlook the hatred  of these revisions, and to see them as having no relation to their experience?

Because there is nothing more to wait for. The façade has been removed. The naked, gloating face of misogyny and child-hating is staring the world in the face, defying interference. They don't even have to pretend anymore. Celibate men are entitled to sexually exploit children, and women will not be allowed to interfere.

It’s not about Mel Gibson anymore. It’s about the people who would continue to hire him, support him, defend him, see his movies. It’s not about the Pope anymore. It’s about the people, and especially the women, who would continue to believe in, to support, to belong to, and to contribute to the Catholic church.

There is nothing more to wait for. Really. This is the bottom line. Believe it.

I just finished reading an article in The New York Times about a film by the late artist Larry Rivers. The film had been part of an archive of his work belonging to the Larry Rivers Foundation, which was just sold to New York University.

The problem is that the film is child pornography. Well, no. Actually, the problem is that New York University seems unable to recognize that it’s child pornography, because it was made by a famous man using his two daughters as subjects. The problem is that New York University is denying the daughters’ request that the film be destroyed. NYU has agreed to restrict access to the film for the lifetime of the women, but that’s it… because, after all, this is the work of a great man.

Wait a minute… Isn’t it illegal to buy child pornography? To own it? This is a film where the father’s voice is heard telling his reluctant daughters to take off their clothes. The camera zooms in on the breasts or the genitalia, while the father asks prurient questions about their boyfriends and comments on the changes in their bodies. The filming began when one of the girls was 11 and covered a period of five years or more. The girls, visibly self-conscious, are naked or topless. One of them barely speaks. What part of “child pornography” doesn’t NYU understand?

But there’s another way to look at this. Who owns the work?

I’m going to make a radical proposition here: I’m going to propose that childhood be recognized as a sovereign state, and that children be treated as the indigenous populations of a world colonized by adults.

Most folks don’t want to think of children that way, because most of us don’t want to consider how many children are living as captives, how socializing the child is really about colonizing her. And it’s easy for us not to think about them this way, because they do not have a voice, a movement, a lobby, a dime—and they never will.  Children do not have a language specific to their experience with which to frame a paradigm of their sovereignty. And that lack of language is one of the most priceless aspects of their culture. It is a culture of astounding plasticity, adaptability. It is a culture of magic, of naiveté, of gullibility, of heartbreaking innocence and spontaneity. 

“Cultural restitution” is a term that refers to returning stolen works of art and artifacts and bones of indigenous cultures. When the Nazis raided the museums of Europe to enhance their own prestige, they were operating according to the laws of their own corrupt regime. These seizures are not recognized as legitimate by a world restored to sanity, and, after a slow start, the stolen works of art are being identified and returned. It is immaterial that they may have been sold to third and fourth parties unaware of their original status as Nazi contraband. The rights of the victims have been affirmed.

“Cultural restitution” also refers to art and artifacts taken from indigenous cultures to be housed in museums or historical collections. Skeletons and burial artifacts are being returned to the tribes from whom they were taken by archeologists. There is an acknowledgement that a sovereign people have a right to their history and their culture, and that it is a violation of the sovereignty for another people, even a conquering one, to appropriate the artifacts of that history or culture.

This obscene film by Larry Rivers is an artifact of the corpse of his daughters’ raided and stolen childhood. It was never his to bequeath, and it had no place in the archive passed on to the Larry Rivers Foundation, and New York University has no right to purchase it. It belongs to the daughters. It is the documentation of their violation. It is the reliquary of their lost innocence.  

Children have a right to their lives, to their experience. And when a colonizing, predatory adult invades this world, exploiting their vulnerability and raiding their innocence in the name of “art,” children should have the right of an indigenous people to claim the artifact that bears witness to their invasion and colonization.

Was it collaborative? Was this a joint cultural effort between the sovereign state of childhood and the empire of adulthood? This is what one of the daughters, Emma Tamburlini, has to say about her experience: She tells us that it caused her to become anorexic at sixteen, that she has spent years in therapy trying to deal with her father’s behavior. She says that, if she objected to taking off her clothes and being filmed, her father would say she was “uptight,” a “bad daughter.” When she tried to confront him as a teenager, he told her that her intellectual development had been arrested. Seems he was a verbal abuser, as well…

Ms. Tamburlini sums up: “It wrecked a lot of my life, actually.” That sounds about right, actually.

The other sister, the one who is so quiet in the film, declined to comment.

It’s very clear that the daughters’ participation was not voluntary. This was not a situation between equals. It was between a child and an adult—a dependent and her caregiver. Children in a situation like Rivers’ daughters have no more power to resist than the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, who were ordered to strip and participate in sexually humiliating scenarios.

If there is ever a more clear-cut issue of ownership in this world, it is the right of child to the privacy and integrity of her body. What could be more intimately one’s property than one’s organs, one’s skin? What can be more clear than the dependence of a child? There is no ambiguity here. There is no debate about “what is art.” The film is pedophilic and pornographic, a record of incestuous abuse.

This is not a scientific film documenting the developmental stages of mammary glands. This is not an erotic film, celebrating the sensual beauty of adult women. This is a film about humiliation. The subject of the film is the sexual subordination of two girls and their mother to the prurient and pedophilic obsession of a predatory father.

And what about this mother? She participated in the film, certainly enabling the abuse of her daughters. On the other hand, in 1981, she managed to prevent her perpetrator of a husband from showing the film at an exhibition. According to her, “What Larry said was that it would belong to [the girls], as a record that when they got older they could look back at… It wasn’t a huge thing. It’s become huge, because they can’t get back what was given to them.”

Begging to differ, it was a huge thing. Although it's understandable why a daughter in a situation like this might feel safer sharing her feelings with a reporter from a national newspaper.

Here is my fantasy: The daughters will sue. Hundreds of child psychologists and pediatricians, as well as experts in international law will show up for the trial to give testimony. A new precedent will be set. The rights of children will be recognized as those of a sovereign nation, an indigenous people. Damages will be awarded, and, under laws pertaining to cultural restitution, the film will be returned to the two women whose childhood was invaded and violated.

And in my fantasy, Emma Tamburlini will testify, using the same words cited in the Times article. She will say: “I don’t want the film out there in the world.” And then she will repeat a statement she made, a statement straight from the heart of her childhood nightmare, spoken in the elusive and elliptical language of children. And maybe there will be an official interpreter who can translate it into the pedestrian regionalism of adulthood, in words that even a librarian at NYU can understand.

The daughter’s statement is this: “It just makes it worse.”

And, of course, every child understands.

This is the fourth and final part of my series on incest denial, which has been inspired by reading Lynn Sacco’s long-overdue book Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History.

Quick recap of the timeline:

• Colonial era: Surprising candor about incest as evidenced by number of reports in the paper, including cases involving middle-class and socially prominent men; civic outrage in favor of victims; packed courtrooms; death sentences and hard labor.

• After 1860’s: Steep decline in coverage, scapegoating of immigrant populations and African Americans. Denial of prevalence, disbelief of survivors, medical community discourages using presence of gonorrhea in victims as evidence, insisting that the vaginitis must be non-venereal.
  

• After discovery of gonococcus bacterium: Doctors insist that girls can contract gonorrhea from toilet seats. Focus shifts to mothers and their inattention to hygiene. Infected girls are socially ostracized as carriers of potential epidemics.
  

• 1940’s and 1950’s: Theories of Freud enter the popular culture. Reports of incest by girls are interpreted as fantasies based on their desires to have sex with their fathers. Kinsey insists that the damage from child sexual abuse comes from puritanical ideas in the culture, not from the rape itself.

• 1980’s: All hell breaks lose. The Women’s Liberation Movement empowers women to tell our stories, to trust each other and ourselves. Rape and incest come out of the closet. Epidemic of sexual abuse exposed. Huge boom in academic studies, self-help books, films, novels, memoirs dealing with incest. Feminists theorize that incest is a gender issue and a political issue. Father-daughter incest is framed as “the paradigm of patriarchy.”

So… that was twenty years ago, right? The next bullet point should say: Incest epidemic over. Massive prosecutions and public awareness campaigns. Culture arrives at “zero tolerance” attitude.

Nope. That didn’t happen. There was a backlash. Amazingly enough it was fueled by pedophiles and perpetrators, and the culture sided with them.

In 1993, the New York Times Book Review ran a front page article by a woman about the “cult of victimhood” fostered by the women’s movement. She made reference to the “incest survivor machine.”  During the 1990’s, feminism became the “f” word, as postmodernism took over the academy, declaring that “woman” was a social construct and that anyone relating it to anatomy or biology was something called an “essentialist.” “Essentialism” was framed as a mystical term, when, in fact, there has never been a more more tail-swallowing, self-referentially obfuscating philosophy than postmodernism. Interestingly enough, and NOT coincidentally at all, two of the founders of postmodernism, Foucault and Derrida, had taken public, pro-pedophilia stances for abolishing age of consent altogether in France.  

Women began to believe that it was empowering to ignore gendered oppression. Something called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) was established. It was founded in 1992 by Pamela and Peter Freyd, shortly after their daughter Jennifer privately confronted them with her memory of father-daughter incest. At least one member of their board had connections with pedophilic organizations. The scientific community has never endorsed or validated this so-called syndrome, and memory repression is a documented response to trauma, especially in childhood. Peter Freyd, interestingly, was an admitted alcoholic with a history of multiple hospitalizations and psychiatric care.

This foundation, with its pseudo-scientific theories, launched a huge media campaign. Carefully, they framed incest accusations as attacks on the families, protecting the fact that the perpetrators were overwhelmingly fathers. Not stopping there, they accused therapists of encouraging the revenge fantasies of their clients, or even suggesting and implanting memories. They began to sue. The fact that so many incest survivors were seeking help from therapists began to be used against them, “proof” that False Memory Syndrome was taking place.

They sued the authors of Courage to Heal, a book that has saved lives and given hope to thousands. They did not win the suit, but they were successful in getting legislation passed to limit insurance benefits for psychotherapy. They demanded that, in order to prove the validity of an incest memory, the survivor would need to remember every detail with complete accuracy. Not surprisingly, no survivor could meet their standards.

How does Sacco sum up her studies on father-daughter incest in American history? With this statement: “… shoring up the social power of certain men has, at every turn, been more important than protecting the physical and emotional integrity of girls, who have paid dearly to keep the fabric of American society, its ideologies and social hierarchies, intact.”

But… I want to add a postscript. Postmodernism is waning. The priesthood scandals (where boys constituted the majority of victims, by the way) have raised international outrage about the issue of child sexual abuse. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought the issue of PTSD to the forefront of veteran care, and with it, a validation of the impact of trauma. Military Sexual Trauma has been identified and been the subject of a Congressional investigation. (and my blog!) Sadly, little has changed, but it has been validated. The global economic and environmental crises are waking people up to the consequences of our rapacious attitudes of entitlement. Young women, saddled with staggering student loans and increasing pornographifying of the culture, are beginning to realize that ignoring their oppression is not empowering, but just foolish.

I encourage all of us to write the post-backlash chapter. To tell the truth. To confront perpetrators. To stop having Thanksgiving dinner, or Hanukkah, or Christmas, or Kwanzaa across the table from our rapists. To stop letting the enablers off the hook.  Get the support to name it, confront it, demand accountability, and respond appropriately when that accountability is not forthcoming. Find good therapists, therapists who can identify Complex PTSD and who know how to treat it. Read Judith Herman, take responsibility for your health care. Arm yourself with knowledge, including knowledge of incest history, books like Unspeakable.

Never, ever let anyone or any voice in your head tell you that incest is not that big a deal, not that important in light of the world’s “real problems,” not significant in your own history. Never abandon your truth. Never abandon yourself. And, in the words of survivor Marilyn Van Derbur:

“We must say to every member of our society: If you violate your children, they may not speak today, but as we gather our strength and stand beside them, they will, one day, speak your name. They will speak every single name.”


Click here to read "Incest Denial Part 1"
Click here to read "Incest Denial Part 2"
Click here to read "Incest Denial Part 3"

This is the third part of a series of blogs on Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History.

According to author Lynn Sacco, incest received quite a bit of unbiased press prior to the Civil War. She located 500 reports of father-daughter incest in 900 newspapers from 1817 to 1899. And, surprisingly, these reports often identified the perpetrators as respectable or prominent men. Also surprisingly, the public did not respond with disbelief. In fact, they responded with outrage. Juries would pass verdict without leaving their seats. Lynch mobs were formed. Courtrooms were packed to suffocation with people wanting to see the trials.

Then something happened. Sacco reports she could only locate 136 cases reported between 1900 and 1940, and half of those were crowded into the first decade. Few of these were upper or middle class families. Courtrooms were closed. Details were kept out of the press. What happened?

Two things. After the Civil War the waves of immigration began and former captives were freed. The belief took hold that it was these foreign and/or so-called "primitive" races who had proclivities toward sexual depravity. Some European immigrant populations did believe that having sex with a virgin would cure venereal disease. Much was made of this in the medical community… and then there was the issue of hygiene.

The doctors, faced with an epidemic of girls with gonorrhea, first declared that what they were seeing was not a venereal disease. There was no way to dispute this prior to the development of a lab test for identifying the gonococcus bacterium.  After that, the doctors developed a theory that these girls were becoming infected from toilet seats and washcloths. That theory, for which there was no proof, was treated as a scientific fact for nearly fifty years. This lent itself to xenophobia and racism. The stereotype of the filthy immigrant dovetailed nicely with this theory of transmission of gonorrhea. Mothers were advised that their immigrant servants were the source of contamination, or public toilets.

In the 1950’s the theories of Freud had become part of the popular culture. Freud’s initial research had uncovered the epidemic of father-daughter rape, but the ridicule of his colleagues and perhaps a situation involving his own family seemed to have triggered a panicked repudiation of this early work. These narratives of rapes were not reports of actual sexual assaults at all… they were fantasies! Yes, that’s it! They were fantasies by little girls who were not traumatized by their fathers, but who actually desired them! Of course! It’s so obvious… In fact, what was traumatizing them was their realization that they did not have a penis. They were anxious that they had been castrated. Of course. That makes sense, right?

And then there was Kinsey, whose protection and enabling of pedophiles has begun to come to light. His position was that the harm from pedophilia was not from the assault itself, but from the puritanical attitudes of the culture toward the perpetrator.* The inmates running the asylum. (And yes, I'm linking this to the Reisman research on this... with the caveat that her agenda lumps lesbians and gays in with pedophiles. But her work on Kinsey is nonetheless illuminating.)

And then everything changed. Forever. And women changed it. And how did we do that? We recovered our language. We started to talk to each other, and when we did that, we began to trust each other, and when we did that we began to trust ourselves. And that is when all hell broke loose. We began to say we had been raped, and that it was not a fantasy; it was not a bad date; it was not what we were wearing. It was not our fault; it was not our mother’s fault. In the inimitable words of one of the greatest truth-tellers of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Andrea Dworkin, “It’s the perpetrator, stupid.” (And if you have never been to the Dworkin website, take a tour...)

The truth about rape was inconvenient for everyone. Rape, it turns out, was not a rare occurrence in a dark alley. It was a common occurrence, and the perpetrators were most often known to the victims, and the home was the most common site. In fact, one out of three women were survivors of sexual assault.

On the heels of these revelations, came the discovery that incest was more than the subject of stereotyped jokes about Appalachian mountain people. Incest was epidemic and occurred as frequently in middle-class homes as it did in low-income homes. Finally, the unspeakable was being spoken.

Incest… How important is that in light of the Gulf Coast volcano, or the endless wars around the world, or global warming…?  I mean, really. Isn't it  just more of the West’s navel-gazing, my-mother-didn’t-love-me narcissism...? I mean, really?

I mean REALLY. It is the root, it is the ground zero, it is the central organizing paradigm of the patriarchy. Yes, really, I mean the patriarchy. That male-dominated system that, in the words of Robin Morgan, institutionalizes dissociation. What does that mean? It means it splits off profit motive from the murder of animals. It sees an oil leak as good for the Gross National Product, because it generates jobs and stimulates technology. Ditto war. The military is the largest consumer of goods in the US.