Wow. A lot of confusion about rape in the news these days.

We have Congressman Todd Akin telling us that “legitimate rapes” don’t result in pregnancies. We have Senate candidate Tom Smith comparing pregnancy from rape to “having a baby out of wedlock.”  Last year, Paul Ryan co-sponsored a bill in Congress that would ban federal funding of abortions except in cases of “forcible rape,” a term which he has refused to define, because, as he insists, it’s “stock language.” We have all kinds of liberal folks (seriously… Noam Chomsky?) insisting that Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of the whistleblowing website Wikileaks, who has been accused of rape and sexual assault, should not have to respond to Swedish police questioning, because—you know, he’s one of “our” guys. 

 Whoopi Goldberg has gone on record (never retracted) declaring that it was not a “rape-rape” when Roman Polanski drugged and vaginally, orally, and anally assaulted a thirteen-year-old who claimed, “I said, ‘No, no. I don't want to go in there. No, I don't want to do this. No!’, and then I didn't know what else to do.” This week the Guardian ran a story with this headline, “How do we teach young people what sexual consent really means?”

My sisters, this is a boatload of confusion. 

And, I would submit not just confusion on the part of the perpetrators and their allies. I remember teaching an Intro to Women’s Studies class not all that long ago, and I conducted an anonymous survey. Turns out that all of the women in the class (they were all under twenty-two) self-reported as sexually active and not having orgasms. When I attempted to teach a workshop on how to communicate with partners about what one enjoys in bed, I discovered to my chagrin that none of my students had the slightest interest in this. Apparently, what they were having was not really “sex-sex.” One had to wonder whether or not it might be “rape-rape.”

Later on, teaching at an elite private college, I began asking questions about the experiences of the young women I was teaching. When asked if they knew of cases of date rape on campus, they expressed uncertainty as to whether or not their experiences with men would qualify. Since studies have shown that one in four college women have either been raped or suffered attempted rape, and since studies have also shown that one in twelve male students surveyed had committed acts that met the legal definition of rape, and since studies have also shown that one third of males surveyed said that they would commit rape if they could escape detection, and since one fourth of men surveyed believed that rape was acceptable if the woman asks the man out, and the man pays for the date or the woman goes back to the man's room after the date… well, I don’t think it's going too far out on a limb to suggest that a significant number of these confused young women had, indeed, been date raped.

The problem here appears to run deeper than “No means no.” Looking for the source of the confusion, I believe that I may have found the culprit.

It’s the word “sex.” Check it out:

In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, sex is defined as “sexually motivated phenomena or behavior.” Not too helpful. Kind of like looking up “tennis” and reading that it is a  “tennis phenomenon or behavior.”

Looking up “sexual” is not much help either:  “having or involving sex"...  which of course leads us back to “sexual.”

Sex, like “forcible rape,” appears to be “stock language.” Nobody needs to define it, because we all know what it is.  But--see above--apparently not.

I am a writer, and like under-celebrated, African American  genius Toni Cade Bambara, I believe in “acts of language.” I’m going to commit one now. I’m going to suggest a new word for sex. And it’s going to be a gynocentric, subjective word, referencing the clitoris not the vagina.

I’m going to propose the words “cypriate” and “cypriation” for female genital activity initiated by the subject, for the primary intention of experiencing a pleasurable arousal of the clitoris. For example, “Last night, next to the waterfall,  I cypriated with my partner.” Or… “Cypriation at the full moon can be especially intense.” 

I admit, I am taking my cue from the late, great Monique Wittig, whose acts of language opened my eyes to wild possibility. In her Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, she and Sande Zeig coined the word “la cyprine” to refer to the vaginal secretions that signal sexual desire.  [“Sécrétion vaginale, signe physique du désir sexuel. Une agitation trouble l'écoulement de la cyprine.”]  The derivation for her neologism is the island of Cyprus, legendary birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

Obviously cypriation does not refer to many of the acts that are considered sex or sexual in the heteropatriarchal world. In fact, it probably refers to only a tiny minority.  But adopting the use of this word will require that the subject own her agency, and it will also validate her own pleasure as something of primary, defining significance.

In other words, these young women who are unclear about whether or not they are experiencing date rape will have absolute clarity as to whether or not they are experiencing cypriation. Furthermore it will facilitate their understanding that any interaction with their vulva that is not cypriation is a potential form of violation and not acceptable... unless, perhaps, the woman's primary incentive is achieving pregnancy.

There should never have been one word that could be used to refer to pleasurable, welcome sexual activity for women and, at the same time, any and all violations or torture of her genitals. There should never have been a word for sexual activity that confused an act designed for procreation with an act designed for a woman’s pleasure. There should never be a word that can be taken to assume that actions pleasing to men and their genitals are or should be pleasing to women and our genitals. Sex and rape are only synonymous for rapists. Vagina and vulva are only synonymous where the clit and the woman’s pleasure are incidental or irrelevant.

What has happened is that women’s experience and women’s anatomy and women's pleasure have been stolen in a linguistic equivalent of three-card monte.

Sisters, take back the clit! Occupy the dictionary! And as our great foremother Sappho would sing, “We shall enjoy it/ as for him who finds/ fault, may silliness/ and sorrow take him!”

“…truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.”—Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor.”

I recently revisited the Matilda Joslyn Gage House in Fayetteville, New York. It was something of a pilgrimage, as I consider her one of my spiritual foremothers. In fact, I took her last name as my own.

The visit brought to mind a quotation by the lesbian poet Adrienne Rich, on the subject of truth. She spoke of it as an “increasing complexity.” Historically, I have preferred my truth monochrome, monothematic—because I find comfort in certitude. It’s a near relation to rectitude, and rectitude purchases indemnity. But I digress.

Matilda Gage was a Suffrage worker. She was part of a triumvirate, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They were the leaders and the strategists of the movement. They hung out together. They were comrades-in-arms and best friends... until they weren’t. And that moment came in 1890, when Gage discovered that Anthony had gone behind her back  to recruit Stanton in brokering a deal to merge the National Women's Suffrage Association with a rival Suffrage organization made up of conservative, Christian women. Gage woke up to find herself ousted from the organization she had helped lead for twenty years... and well on her way to being written out of history.

This was why I had chosen to be her namesake, actually: Because Gage had refused to compromise her principles in the name of expediency. She would not compromise in her opposition to a “white-women-only” Suffrage campaign, nor would she compromise on her opposition to the Church. In fact, she had written an entire book, Woman, Church and State, unmasking the misogyny of Christian history, supporting her thesis that the exploitation of women was not some oversight or side effect of Christianity, but was it’s entire raison d’être. In other words, Christianity could not be redeemed.

I loved Gage’s radical vision. I loved her refusal to compromise, even when it cost her so dearly.

But, standing in the Gage House nearly three decades after taking her name, I found myself revisiting my own history as well as hers. And her history was that of a married, middle- class woman with four children and a husband who supported her. Gage did not have to earn her living, nor did she have to worry about how she would survive in old age.

My history, since coming out, had been that of a low-income, single lesbian who supported herself largely through touring around the country and giving lectures and performances. Standing in the Gage House, I realized with a jolt that my life experience had more in common with that of Susan B. Anthony—a single, working-class lesbian who supported herself with public speaking—than with Matilda Gage.

And this realization caused me to revisit that historic betrayal of 1890.

Susan B. Anthony had co-founded the first Women's Temperance Movement with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as President. That movement has been mocked as a bunch of tee-totaling Miss Grundies attempting, with hysterical fervor, to police the harmless dissipation of others. In fact, it was a movement of battered women, of activists against domestic violence. It was a movement of survivors of sexual abuse and especially of incest. In the early nineteenth century, a married woman could not own property, could not inherit, could not own her own wages, could not own her own children. Wife-beating and marital rape were legal, and any woman attempting to seek relief through the courts would face an all-male jury. The woman who married an alcoholic was in for a lifetime of terror and abuse, and so were her children. Outlawing liquor appeared to be the quickest way to seek relief legislatively from this nightmare, and the Church was more inclined to support temperance than women’s enfranchisement.

Anthony’s roots were in this movement of survivors. The personal stories of suffering that she encountered would be familiar to any rape crisis or shelter worker. The needs were immediate: shelter, food, protection, medical attention, social services for the children.

Anthony had moved away from the temperance movement to the movement for Suffrage, but those roots and those experiences continued to inform her activism. Standing in the Gage House, which is in a lovely middle-class neighbhood of large houses with landscaped yards, I began to experience the increasing complexity of that so-called betrayal.

Gage’s uncompromising stance, pristine in its radicalism, could have  delayed Suffrage by decades--or even centuries, depending on how deeply the Church was alienated. How would that position read to a woman like Anthony? Might it not look like a function of class privilege? Gage, with her feminist and middle-class husband, might be willing to die before seeing her goals realized, but for women in desperate circumstances, delay could be fatal.  Even limited power, limited Suffrage, would be a foot in the door, a toehold… a something for so many women who had nothing. And these conservative Christian women had resources, lots of them. Was it easier for a woman who was not needing to support herself to turn down that money on principle than for a woman  scraping out a living on the lecture circuit? A woman for whom marriage could never be an option?

I remembered the words of Florynce Kennedy: “'Nothing but the best for the oppressed' translates to ‘nothing for the oppressed.’” And I remembered the words of another legendary activist, Bernice Reagon Johnson: “If you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a broad enough coalition.”

And Anthony was lesbian. Let us never forget that. She did not love men, did not want men. She desired women. She understood that her tribe could never experience security or domesticity in our relationships until women had equal access to education and to jobs. In 1890, she was seventy, in an era before Medicare and Social Security. She was also often desperately lonely in her touring work. One of her lovers had been Anna Dickinson, who  also supported herself as a public speaker. How much could Stanton with her seven children and Gage with her four understand about their lives? And, it is important to remember that the temperance movement leader was Frances Willard, also a lesbian.

Was it Gage who betrayed Anthony in her refusal to compromise, holding their Suffrage organization hostage to a radical vision that was so far ahead of its time? It was easy for Gage to explore spiritualism and other metaphysical systems, when she was not dependent upon the Church as a support system that could provide community, emergency health care, and financial relief, as well as ideological support for the purity and sanctity of womanhood--a lifeline to women struggling with the contempt and violence of their spouses. How relevant would the historical violations of the Church be to these women who had nowhere to turn but the Church?  Was it realistic to expect them to catch up to doctrines of radical feminism in their lifetimes?

I left the Gage House overwhelmed. It was difficult to resist the temptation to think I had been wrong. Right and wrong have no place in “increasing complexity.” The world has need of radical and visionary thinkers, as well as for the pragmatic, on-the-ground, coalition-building, compromise-making activists. There will always be a tension between the two positions, and that tension can provide a healthy check against the excesses to which each is liable. 

The Gage House stood as a bulwark of rectitude for me in my younger days, when I was in the process of reinventing myself. Today my appreciation of it has increased in complexity. Today it is an invitation to go deeper, to challenge everything--even to examine  my beloved foremother through the lens of  working-class, lesbian activism.

Take a tour of the Matilda Gage House website. This essay, narrowly focused on a specific facet from my own experience, does not in any way do justice to this remarkable woman, who did "walk her talk" in so many radical ways. Her home was on the Underground Railroad, and, because of her coalition work with Native women in her area,  she was adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation. Her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, would author the beloved Oz books, with their gender-bending heroines. Her crusade for separation of Church and State is especially relevant today. Sally Roesch Wagner is the visionary and pragmatic Executive Director of the Gage Foundation, and, I am privileged to say, a friend and colleague.

The Internet is abuzz with the posthumous outing of astronaut Sally Ride. Everyone seems to have an opinion, and these appear to be divided into two camps. Some folks wish that Dr. Ride, as an iconic astronaut, had been out publicly as a powerful role model in the LGBT community. Indeed, there is a posthumous campaign on Facebook to point out the fact that, because of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), her partner Tam O’Shaughnessy will not be able to receive federal death and pension benefits.

Others, taking their cue from Dr. Ride’s sister, support her decision to remain publicly closeted, citing her right to privacy and attributing her reticence to her Norwegian background. Others point out the excessive and unwelcome attention to her gender and personal life (“Do you wear a bra in space?”) to which the media subjected her as the first woman in space. The Washington Post wrapped up their defense of her closet with this summation: “… Ride lived in a world where we should all live, a place where we celebrate someone for her accomplishments and not her sexual orientation.”

Actually, Washington Post, a lesbian orientation is an accomplishment. Historically, and certainly in Dr. Ride’s lifetime, living a lesbian life has meant overcoming substantial obstacles and negotiating myriad oppressive situations. Living a lesbian life has meant excommunication and expulsion from religious organizations; discharge from the military; disinheritance and estrangement from families of birth; incarceration in mental asylums; harassment, discrimination and firing in the workplace; loss of housing; loss of educational opportunities; being banned from teaching jobs; loss of custody of one’s children; loss of partnership benefits including pensions and health insurance; and loss of one’s career.

These are specific oppressions, and living with them results in adoption of strategies, formation of alliances, invention and creation of alternative systems of support. There is the weightlessness of an invisible identity that defies the gravitational pull of what many experience as compulsory heterosexuality, and this weightlessness comes with both freedoms and challenges. There is a certain traction and grounding that come from rooting oneself in societal norms.  The oxygen of societal acceptance and approval is taken for granted by those for whom it constitutes the air they breathe. In the closed space of the closet, there is a suffocating lack of circulation. Dr. Ride lived her life in a secret orbital, and the special conditions of that orbital informed her choices, her character, and her legacy.

Dr. Ride’s sister stated that Sally did not believe in labels, the inference being that lesbianism is a label.

Newsflash: Being lesbian is an identity, and nothing could be further from a label. When you label me, you spraypaint an offensive epithet on my front door. That’s not pleasant for me, but I can paint over it. It does not affect who I am or how I live. When you insist that “lesbian” is nothing more than a label, what you are doing is very aggressive. You are attempting to evict me from my home, deny me access to my community, cut me off from my heritage and history, appropriate a tremendous body of literature, and disappear my culture. Insisting that my identity is nothing more than a label supports heterosexist hegemony and isolates and marginalizes me. It’s also more than a little pornographic, because attempting to reduce the richness of lesbian history and culture to a personal sexual practice is the hallmark of a fetish.

And in case the apologists of the closet are relying on the “born that way” argument to trivialize lesbian identity, they should understand that lesbians are not gay men. Lesbianism has always represented an empowering choice in patriarchal cultures.

Time out for a brief history lesson: Here in the US, until the invention of reliable birth control, women could not practice heterosexuality outside of marriage without risking extremely severe consequences. I am talking about the stigma of the notorious “fallen” or tragically “ruined” woman, with the searing rejection of out-of-wedlock children—often relinquished for adoption under economic, or religious, or social—or all-three—pressures.

On the other hand, the socially sanctioned expression of heterosexuality—marriage—was a dangerous and degrading institution for women. In an era before birth control, women could not deny their husbands sex, and this could mean serial pregnancies for two decades or more, with the attendant toll on both psychological and physical health. It often meant too many children to protect or provide for. The rates for infant mortality were nearly as high as the rates for death in childbirth. Wives could be raped and beaten with impunity, could not inherit money, could not own their own wages, vote, serve on juries (critical factor in rape trials), could not own their children.  Husbands could have their wives incarcerated indefinitely in mental asylums. This was still true through the middle of the twentieth century.

The woman with enough self-esteem to insist on control of her body; the woman with dreams of creative, entrepreneurial, or intellectual work; and the woman whose childhood experiences of male sexuality were traumatic enough to preclude her fulfilling the obligations of the marriage bed had two choices: celibacy or lesbianism. Many women chose lesbianism. And many of these, not surprisingly, were women of achievement. Scratch around under the surface of these thousands of exceptional, historical “single women,” (as Ride was presumed to be) and you will usually find the lesbianism.

Dr. Ride made her choices during her lifetime, as we all do, weighing her priorities and considering consequences. For many women whose lifework is with children, and especially in the field of education, the closet has been compulsory.

But Dr. Ride is dead now, and, in exiting the planet, has exited her closet. There is no reason to attempt to stuff her legacy back into that prison, except of course the usual heterosexist impulse to erase lesbian achievement, impoverish our history, appropriate our lives. What is the motivation behind that impulse? Could it have something to do with the fact that a disproportionately high number of women of pioneering achievement are lesbians… and especially in arenas traditionally dominated by men? Why is this still true today? Clearly the label theory will not provide us with an answer. We can only begin to understand this high percentage of lesbian achievers when we begin to explore and celebrate the resistance, the iconoclasm, the strategic brilliance, the hard-won integrity, and the deep gynophilic passion that are indigenous to lesbian identity. Dr. Sally Ride embodied all of these qualities, as a lesbian, and they cannot be separated from her accomplishments.

This essay was originally published in On the Issues: A Magazine of Feminist, Progressive Thinking, July 27, 2012.