So I have lots of opinions, and especially opinions about celebrities, because I consume popular media.
 
Given this proclivity to be opinionated along with the media’s proclivity to manipulate, I usually keep these opinions to myself. But every now and then I experience a 180-degree reversal of my opinion (see my blog on the Amber Heard/ Johnny Depp trial), and, when that happens, I feel it might be of some use to share about it.
 
So… here goes:

This is going to be a blog about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, and the now-infamous “plane episode” that Jolie claims to have been the reason why she ended the relationship.
 
To recap their relationship: “Pitt and Jolie announced their engagement in April 2012 after seven years together. They were legally married on August 14, 2014. On September 19, 2016, Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt, citing irreconcilable differences. On April 12, 2019, the divorce became legal.” [Wikipedia]
 
But the wrangling has continued.  The two are embroiled in a complex civil case that involves a jointly-owned chateau/vineyard in France they purchased jointly in 2008.  Apparently, they had a verbal agreement that neither would sell their portion of the property without permission from the other.

Well… In 2022, Jolie sold her share to a Russian businessman without Brad’s permission, and he filed a 67-million-dollar lawsuit against her. Jolie claims that she did try to sell to Brad a year earlier, but that he backed out of the agreement.

I know… *yawn*…
 
But listen up:  She claims that he backed out because his offer to buy required that she sign a non-disclosure agreement that, according to Jolie, would keep her quiet about alleged incidents of abuse by Pitt, toward her and their children. She said this abuse had gone on for years, and that it came to a head in an incident in 2016 on a private plane.
 
Now, at the time, I remember that Jolie reported the incident to the police when the plane landed, and the story in the press was something about Pitt "putting hands on" their oldest son Maddox. Both the FBI and the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services investigated and cleared Pitt of all charges.

Yes, I had an opinion. Pitt just didn’t give off domestic abuser vibes to me. Stoner, yes. Violent abuser, no. Yes, of course, that’s an incredibly stupid opinion for anyone, especially a woman, to have. But I had it. 

I also had an opinion about Jolie based on previous untruths she had told the media. I thought it was not unthinkable she, in a spirit of retaliation, might make exaggerated claims. (Pitt had been accused of a recent infidelity on a film set.) Anyway, after this, Pitt went into recovery and was very public about his history of drinking and smoking pot.
 
Speaking to the New York Times in 2019, Pitt shared, “I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges.” He attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for a year and a half following his split from Jolie. In fact, he was so forthcoming about his struggles with substance abuse disorders, that he caught flack for breaking his own anonymity.

Okay. Good for him. But back to my 180-degree-turn. So Pitt is suing his ex for all kinds of damages, including punitive, for selling the vineyard without his permission. Jolie claims that she was willing, but Brad tacked on the non-disclosure agreement, and now in order to defend herself to the court, she is needing to request an enormous trove of Pitt’s communications, including personal emails, messages, etc.,  dating from the time of the plane incident. The court has agreed with her request, and I’m guessing we’re going to see a settlement.
 
But in her counter-complaint, Jolie shared details about that plane incident that are far more detailed than her previous public disclosures about it.
 
And here are some excerpts:

The narrative makes no mention of anyone else being in the cabin, except the members of the family. That was likely a rarity in a family with a ton of security personnel and household staff.  And it was a long, long flight… from Nice, France to Los Angeles.

This narrative rings true to me, and if it is true, it must have been terrifying. I had never considered how trapped and isolated Jolie and the children were. And, obviously, my opinion of the incident has undergone a sea-change.  I respect that Jolie has refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement, especially when the stakes for refusing were so high. I respect that Jolie, for eight years, kept private these details, probably to protect the children. At this point, however, they are eight years older, all of them are estranged from Pitt, and one has even legally dropped his last name.

What’s my point? I believe Jolie. My earlier opinions did not take into account how frequently abusers mask their behavior until their victims are trapped and cut off from the outside world. I also didn’t take into account how frequently abusers take advantage of a partner’s efforts to protect the children from the media, nor how vulnerable Jolie may have been to  charges of “parental alienation” while custody hearings were pending.

Mea culpa.

Lying has been on my mind this summer. There is a presidential candidate whose brand is, literally, lying. The Washington Post fact-checked the number of lies he told during the years when he was in office:  30,573 lies. And yet, he is the candidate for a major political party. Apparently, people prefer being told what they want to hear, even when it isn’t true.
 
Then, a few weeks ago, I heard a news story on the radio. It stated that the average person tells fourteen lies a day. This surprised me. I have whole days where I don’t even make fourteen statements. An internet search turned up more realistic statistics. One study said people lie twice a day. Another asserted this: “The average person lies four times, totaling 1,460 lies each year. While men lie about six times a day, women lie three times a day, on average.”

And then…. I had a troubling  conversation with a young friend, a recent graduate of an elite college. We were talking about lying, and when I expressed my shock about the fourteen lies, she told me that she had no difficulty believing that at all, and that she probably lied that frequently… and maybe more. 

I was gob-smacked. She saw no problem and was actually proud of her facility in misrepresenting truth. She explained that people like to be told what they want to hear. In other words, it’s not her fault. It’s other people who have incentivized her to lie. And that led me to consider our respective situations. I am comfortably retired. She is just starting her career in a world that is many times more competitive than the one I faced at her age. Is honesty a privilege? A class issue?  Are my survival needs at risk when I tell the truth? Are hers? And does that require a tabling of judgement?

But here’s the thing: Once a person has been caught telling a lie, it’s rational to consider that anything else they say may also be a lie. Not a judgement, just a logical corollary. Also, in order to be accountable to ourselves and to others, we need to be working with our best understanding of the facts when we make our choices. Liars restrict our options in order to keep their own open.
 
But do we operate rationally? Thinking of this current presidential candidate, I would say that apparently half of the country does not. But maybe that’s too black-and-white. Maybe logic is subject to Maslov’s hierarchy of needs. That’s a theory of motivation which states that five categories of human needs dictate an individual's behavior. These are: physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs. Maybe we need to hear what what we want to hear. 

A dependent child, for instance, needs to know that their primary caregivers are reliable; otherwise they can become overwhelmed with anxiety and even terror. They need to protect themselves from knowing that their parents lie to them. I know myself, from growing up with folks in active addiction, that I learned to “fix” all the lies:  “I must have heard them wrong. It’s somehow my fault. They didn’t mean what they said.”  It was a survival strategy. In my early years in recovery, it would take me months before I realized that someone was lying to me. Now, with thirty-plus years in Alanon, I can allow myself to recognize a lie within a day, or even an hour.  I still have difficulty identifying the lie in the moment.

But my young friend’s pride in her lying really bothered me. She wasn’t talking about lying when survival needs were on the line. She was talking about across-the-board lying any time that she perceived the truth as being anything less than what the other person wanted to hear. I really struggled with what I wanted to say to her, and as I did that, I realized that the basis of my struggle lay in a lack of words to describe my experience of working a recovery program to be honest. It was beyond “Thou shalt not tell a lie,” and, for lack of words, that was how I was sounding… preachy, judgmental, holier than thou.
 
And then I remembered something that author and activist Sonia Johnson said: “The means are the ends. HOW we do something is WHAT we get.”

Yes. That’s the thing. And suddenly I knew exactly what I wanted to say to my young friend. And I knew the analogy I would use. It was mountain climbing. Both of us are avid hikers, and my friend will often choose the most challenging route up the mountain. Some of the mountains that we climb have roads to the summit. We could actually drive to the top, but we don’t. That’s not the point. The point is getting there by hiking.
 
For me, lying is like driving to the summit. If standing at the top is the goal, it makes sense to drive. It’s easier. I don’t get tired. And I get there a whole lot faster.
 
How can my friend and I explain why we choose to hike? What are the words? Joy, pride in achievement, exhilaration in pushing limits?  Are there words to describe the experience of being in nature, moving in nature without mechanical aids, being in communion with ourselves among other forms of life?

There are a ton of words for the shortcuts. A ton of words for why they make sense.  But I really struggle to explain why I prefer to walk uphill for hours, sometimes at great risk. It’s one of those “if you know, you know" things.  And, as Sonia says, the means are the end.
 
So what I would say to my young friend is this: Lying is the shortcut to the summit. Her definition of ‘getting there’ is cheating her out of an incredible journey and an incalculable richness of experience. When she hikes to the top, that’s what she gets: the hike to the top. She gets the satisfaction of her effort, and so much more. She also gets a community of like-minded hikers.

When someone works to tell the truth all the time, it’s a steep climb and sometimes a rugged one. Sometimes they don’t get where they wanted to go. Sometimes they have to recalibrate the route. But they build spiritual muscle. I can promise that. They build faith in themselves. They also hone their technique. I’m talking about communication technique. I suppose there is some skill required in telling people what they want to hear, but it’s nothing like the skill set you have to build when you are habitually learning to tell an unpopular or inconvenient truth. When someone gets to the goal without lying, they earn and they own the summit experience in a way that can’t really be described. You just have to live it.

Lying as a way of life reduces the infinitude of life to a singular-dimension, board game of getting what you want. I can’t put it more plainly than this: You lose. You lose even when you win. You may not notice or even miss the people whose trust you have forfeited. You may be progressively extinguishing your capacity for joy in exchange for the cheap thrill of empty goals. You are definitely devaluing truth and authenticity every day.  And, by the way, you’ll need to make a lot of money, because lying cuts you off from the rhythms and flows of reality, which teem with serendipity, synergy and karma. You’ll be needing to pave your own road wherever you go.

The means are the ends. If you get where you’re going by lying, what you will get is a lie. And you better take a picture when you get there; because it's quite possible no one's going to believe you.

“Bernice Reagon is a living treasure in an institution used to dealing with static treasures. When you meet her, you know there’s something there – a vision, a focus, a drive, an intensity – and that’s never changed.”—Ralph Rinzler, Smithsonian Asst Secretary for Public Service

“For more than a half-century Bernice Johnson Reagon has been a major cultural voice for freedom and justice; singing, teaching—speaking out against reacism and organized inequities of all kinds. A child of Southwest Georgia, an African American woman’s voice, born in the struggle against racism in America during the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s and 60’s. Reagon’s life and work supports the concept of community based culture with an enlarged capacity for mutual respect: for self, for those who move among us who seem to be different than us, respect and care for our home, the environment—including the planet that sustains life as we know it.”—from www.bernicejohnsonreagon.com

Dr. Bernice Johnson was a musician, producer, scholar, activist, composer, commentator… and an invaluable role model.
 
I know her work through reading histories of the Civil Rights Movement, through seeing her perform at a number of Sweet Honey in the Rock concerts, and through her writings. Her example, her art, and her counsel about struggle have given me strength, courage, and clarity. It’s the clarity I want to talk about in this blog. I’m going to focus on three memes that are on my screensaver. These are quotations by Dr. Johnson. Here’s the first:

I am lost a lot. I’m autistic, an incest survivor, a woman living with hidden disability, and a lesbian feminist in a neurodivergent, misogynist, heterosexist, ableist, rape culture. I am frequently overwhelmed, scapegoated, confused, and frustrated. Frequently. This advice by Dr. Johnson reminds me that this is to be expected. No shame. Pick yourself up and go back. And for me, that going-back means going back to my first encounter with Second Wave women’s writing, my first encounters with the writing from the women from the Civil Rights movement… Fanny Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara,  Dr. Johnson.

These words helped me understand that I was not crazy, and that I was not alone. They helped me understand the significance of “context,” and that without my own context I would understand myself the way the enemy wanted me to understand myself. Creating my own context, I could see my enemy exactly for who he is. This meme reminds me it’s not enough to go back to a memory. I need to start "doing" again. I need to start doing whatever I was doing when I was not lost. And for me, that is generating work that makes myself visible to myself, that gives voice to the women like me whose voices have been stolen or silenced. This meme reminds me of a piece of recovery wisdom: You can start over at any time.

This is the next meme that continues to alter the course of my life. We humans are social creatures and when we are uncomfortable in social settings, that can mean that we need to adjust our behaviors or attitudes… or that we may be somewhere we do not belong. That discomfort can be interpreted as a warning sign of danger.

Remembering this bit of wisdom from Dr. Johnson enables me to do a self-intervention. I can recalibrate: “I’m in coalition and I’m insanely uncomfortable; therefore I must be nailing it.” I don’t change my position. I don’t apologize. I don’t get up and leave. I stay, I fight, I work. I’m in the right place and doing the right things. The discomfort is normal. It’s healthy. It’s productive. This IS the work. How you do something is what you get. This is bigger than myself and bigger than my ego. As an autistic person, I can have difficulty interpreting my own discomfort as well as the discomfort of other people. Dr. Johnson reminds me that their discomfort can also be healthy and productive. Allow others the lessons of their own struggles.

My final screensaver is not a meme. It was a posting on Toshi Reagon’s Facebook page. It’s the story of a conversation between her and her mother, and it made a deep impression on me. I am frequently up in arms over some fresh outrage… politically, culturally, socially.  I am often calling for my sword and my best horse. Today I grab onto these words by the “Queen Mother”  instead:   “You will not kill people today. They are already dead. Let us move forward.” 
 
I work with “they are already dead.” What did she mean when she said that? Clearly they are not! Look how angry I am!  But I defer to the Queen Mother who has fought way more battles and way more successfully than I could ever imagine. So what does this mean?  I think it means that they have already left the field… or, rather, the field has left them. The field that I am fighting on is somewhere else, something else. The fact that their values are so utterly foreign to mine should make them dead to me in terms of the teeming array of brilliant beings that inform my world… real and imaginary. Which leads right into the next question:

“Have I done my work?”  Isn't this my work... the constant charging out the door? Dr. Johnson reminds me that it probably is not. It’s one more way the patriarchy and rape culture absorb my energies and eat my spirit. Fighting them or subordinating myself to them, they still win: I am not able to pursue my own vision.
 
Yeah, vision. Dr. Johnson again: “Had my anger wiped away or cleared my vision?” Nearly always wiped it away or distorted it.

And here is a sentence that lights up the night sky: “She reminded me not to hover over dead places I had no intention of reviving.”  Okay, truth here:  99% of the time when I am riding out to do battle, I could care less about reviving the institution or the individual with whom I intend to engage. I am fighting to win, to defeat, to overcome, to wipe out an enemy. I am fighting to make it absolutely clear that me, and my views, and my values shall prevail and dominate. I could care less about the spiritual life of the entities opposing me. Isn't that the model for warriors?  No. Not when I remember that Dr. Johnson is one of the greatest warriors who lived in my time. This is the model:  “She reminded me not to hover over dead places I had no intention of reviving.”
 
Again, the word "dead." Already dead. Done. Move on.

And then she ends with this “She told me my only failure in life would be if I could not access my heart to create.” And if I have been struggling with her words prior to this, reluctant to give up my oh-so-righteous fight, this sentence wipes the board clean in one sweep, and I surrender. This is so completely correct. I’ve lived it. I’ve proved it. I know failure and I know success, and she  is absolutely right.
 
My disability includes extreme fatigue, and I suspect the incessant, autistic drive for confronting injustice is a big piece of this. I thought I was being intrepid, noble, self-sacrificing, and sometimes even awesome in these confrontations. That they had disabled me and in all likelihood would end by killing me just seemed like some kind of inescapable collateral damage. This little anecdote as recounted by Dr. Johnson’s daughter has turned my approach to life on its head when nothing else could. Not even death.
 
I’m not someone who gets physical tattoos, but I do collect psychic ones, and the words of Dr. Johnson are tattooed on my soul.  They are the metaphysical letterhead  for my agendas.  Cultural commentator David Brooks writes about "deterioration of motive," which occurs when fear and a sense of threat enter the chat. This is the point when engagement becomes nonproductive and destructive. Dr. Johnson's advice provides me with a standard against which I can check my intentions and I am so grateful to her.

And one final meme...  It's been a privilege to live on the planet at the same time as Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon.

In her concluding remarks in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe took up the question regarding abolition that was on so many white people’s lips, “What can I do?” This is what she wrote:
 
“But what can any individual do? Of that, every individual can judge. There is one thing that every individual can do—they can see to it that they feel right.” [her emphasis]
 
I find myself thinking about this challenge, and her emphasis, during the bombing and invasion of Gaza. What does it mean for me to see to it that I “feel right” about what’s going on? And what qualifies as “feeling right?” Who can be the judge of what “right” means?

When I consider this directive to “see to it” that I feel right, the first thing that comes to me is to search out a wide range of perspectives on the situation. For me, that means to read the Arab world press and the Israeli press, and to read these publications across the right wing, moderate, and liberal spectrum. It means to seek out the opinions of the political leaders in my own country who have earned my respect for decades—and, sadly, they are a precious few.
 
It also means listening to my friends who are often expressing themselves with unfiltered rage, grief, and alarm and from every conceivable point of view. It means listening to friends who are triggered, who are in post-traumatic states. It means listening to friends who are absorbing and responding to horrific propaganda. It means listening to dissociation, demonization, dehumanization, projection, denial, and selective amnesia. It means maintaining compassion in the face of verbal abuse.  It means being wildly misunderstood and developing the algorithms for determining where, when, and how it might be productive to attempt to make myself understood.

It means watching my own process closely, scanning for signs of my own compassion fatigue, frustration, temptation to embrace a simplistic narrative, or  temptation to succumb to the apathy of overwhelm.
 
It means distrusting what I hear and still listening. It means maintaining integrity and emotional sobriety when I become the target of outrage by people who are traumatized. It means responding to, but not reacting to baiting and catcalls. It means holding a number of contradictory emotions and scenarios simultaneously.
 
It means understanding that “feeling right” is an elusive and subjective state, an ever-receding horizon, and that the striving towards it is the closest I can ever come to achieving it.

This “see to it” business is very hard work, and I’m not good at it. I don’t enjoy it. I realize that I enjoy being righteous far more than I do this striving to feel right. But the longer I pursue this injunction of Harriet’s, the more clearly I see that it’s absolutely necessary. It is the price of wholeness.
 
And of course, in terms of action to take, she has been clear: “Of that every individual can judge.”                                

"The Bonobo Appropriation."  There, I fixed it. 
 
What am I talking about? I’m talking about The Bonobo Sisterhood: Revolution Through Female Alliance, a new book by Diane L. Rosenfeld.

I'm not happy with it. Read on...
 
The book is a passionate plea for women to model ourselves after the bonobos, a species of great apes. They are the last of the great apes to be scientifically described, because they weren’t recognized as a separate species until 1929. The bonobos began to get a lot of press during the Second Wave, because, unlike females from other species of great apes-- including humans, the bonobo females are empowered. They are not stalked, threatened, battered, raped, or murdered by the males. Their culture and their species are peaceful.

Dr.Rosenfeld, founding director of the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School, rightfully identifies the bonobos as a species from whom we have much to learn. In fact, she urges women to be “bonobos,” to hear the “bonobo call” of our sisters in distress, to subscribe to the “Declaration of Unified Independence from Patriarchal Violence” and the “Preamble to the Bonobo Sisterhood Constitution.” The entire book appears to be an homage to female bonobos and a call to us humans to reverse our evolutionary course away from the path of the patriarchally violent chimps and in the direction of the bonobos.

Rosenfeld’s credentials on the subject of violence against women are impressive: She was the  first Senior Counsel in the Office on Violence Against Women at the United States Department of Justice, and before that she was an Executive Assistant Attorney General at the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. She’s got a law degree the university of Wisconsin and a secondary law degree from Harvard.  Her research areas include “Title IX and campus sexual assault prevention and response; prevention of intimate partner homicide; and addressing commercial sexual exploitation of women and girls.”[from the Harvard Law website]

She has spent a long time studying what happens to us, and she has spent a long time studying the jurisprudence that enables perpetrators and betrays us into their hands over and over. I am, frankly, in awe of her focus and her activism.

What I am not in awe of is her appropriation of the bonobo. Her book is, frankly, homophobic.  What sets these female apes apart from all the other great apes is their sexuality. Take a look:

“More often than the males, female bonobos engage in mutual [that is "same-sex"] genital-rubbing behavior, possibly to bond socially with each other, thus forming a female nucleus of bonobo society. The bonding among females enables them to dominate most of the males. Adolescent females often leave their native community to join another community. This migration mixes the bonobo gene pools, providing genetic diversity. Sexual bonding with other females establishes these new females as members of the group.” [Wikipedia]

And how did this amazing adaptation arise, you ask? Well...

“Bonobo clitorises are larger and more externalized than in most mammals; while the weight of a young adolescent female bonobo 'is maybe half' that of a human teenager, she has a clitoris that is 'three times bigger than the human equivalent, and visible enough to waggle unmistakably as she walks.' In scientific literature, the female–female behavior of bonobos pressing genitals together is often referred to as genito-genital (GG) rubbing. This sexual activity happens within the immediate female bonobo community and sometimes outside of it. Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe stated that female bonobos rub their clitorises together rapidly for ten to twenty seconds, and this behavior, ‘which may be repeated in rapid succession, is usually accompanied by grinding, shrieking, and clitoral engorgement;’ he added that it is estimated that they engage in this practice ‘about once every two hours’ on average." [Wikipedia]

Tribadism once every two hours, all day, every day.  Females across the board preferring sex with each other to sex with males. Every two hours. Yeah, that would definitely change the culture, not to mention the course of history.

Dr. Rosenfeld makes absolutely ZERO mention of bonobo sexuality, except to note that the females, as a result of their remarkable sisterhood, have empowered themselves to have sexual autonomy. In other words, she puts the cart before the horse and then eliminates the horse altogether.

Understandably, that cart is not going anywhere.

Without female-to-female sexual bonding there is no bonobo sisterhood, no powerful alliance to counter male aggression, no acceptance of females into new tribes, no intergenerational female bonds.

Her omission is no oversight. It flies in the face of primatology and common sense. This evolved, large, frontally-located clitoris is the engine that drives the female bonding. In fact, primatologist Franz de Waal notes in his book Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist that the levels of oxytocin, the “love drug,” are higher in the urine of female bonobos after sex with another female... higher than after sex with males. Enhanced oxytocin production has been seen as a hormone to facilitate childbirth, but it is probable that it significantly enhances bonding.

Dr. Rosenfeld wants to have her cake and eat it. She wants the bonobo empowerment, but  she wants it to happen in heteropatriarchy. In fact, she wants it to prop up heteronormativity. She wants to lift up the culture of bonobos as a model for human culture. She wants to write a best-selling book on the thesis that all women need to do is understand the potency of female bonding in order to emulate it. She doesn’t want to have to lose any readers by bringing up the persistent, round-the-clock, same-sex, genital activity that is the single most obvious, unique, and prominent behavioral trait of the female bonobos.

Because if she did, she might have to acknowledge that this same-sex activity among females, most notably among lesbians, does indeed lend itself to unique female bonding. Lesbian history shows us over and over how lesbian women have confronted males, established alternative all-female institutions, led the fight for feminist social reforms, and developed counter-cultural narratives to challenge the patriarchy.

Dr. Rosenfeld would have her readers believe that the bonobos were a species whose females achieved autonomy through mystically evolved feminist brains instead of enormous clitorises. She wants us to believe that heterosexual women can train themselves to think like them, and form alliances as enduring and as powerful as theirs just by using their heads.

This attitude is hugely disrespectful to the millions of women across the millennia who have not wanted to be terrorized and abused. Every woman knows that it is males who perpetrate and aggress against us and against our children, especially our daughters. If the solution was as simple as reading a book about the power of female alliances, I’m sure that book would have been written in hieroglyphs and those alliances would have been made centuries ago.

There is another omission in Rosenfeld’s book. She fails to note that even though chimp culture is patriarchal and the male chimpanzees will attack and batter female chimpanzees, there are no records of the males murdering the females. In fact, humans are the only great ape species that murders its females. After all, how anti-evolutionary can you get... murdering the mothers of the tribe? So, how is it that the chimps don’t murder the females?

Well... Chimpanzees are sexually segregated. The males prefer the company of males, and the females prefer the company of females. Females do not go off with male partners and live in isolation with them. The females stay together, raise their offspring together, and sleep together within earshot of each other. When they do mate, it is in the open and in daylight, where other chimps can witness and intervene.

But the female bonding of the chimps is not mentioned either. Advocating separatism would certainly alienate a heterosexual readership participating in a culture of monogamous pair-bonding.

The solution to male violence against women is not cherry-picking primate outcomes and mistaking them as starting points. The solution is not as simple as “sisterhood.”  If she had consulted with lesbians, studied our sexual bonding and alliances, she would have understood that our culture constitutes a resistance movement. It comes at a price.That price is precisely the stigma that Rosenfeld hopes to avoid with the unscientific omissions in her thesis.

I am reminded of the fable of the drunk person who is looking for their lost keys under the lamppost, when they dropped them somewhere in the dark. Rosenfeld’s search is a cheerful one, and positivity abounds. Lots of light. This won’t be hard at all. We just need to wake up to this new idea.  But the key to solving male violence lies outside the glow of the heteronormative, patriarchal lamppost. I would submit, considering the bonobo example, that heteronormativity is itself a patriarchal concept. Historically, it has never worked in our favor. The key to female autonomy lies in the culture and history of lesbians. The bonding is in the body, and it always will be.

Rosenfeld is extremely knowledgeable about the laws that hold women back. She advocates for changes in the laws around self-defense that acknowledge the patriarchal threats to women, that give us the right to participate in collective self-defense. She advocates for changes in conspiracy laws that acknowledge the ways that male alliances enable large-scale sexual abuse. And finally, she advocates for believing women as credible witnesses.

And yet she gaslights her readers, throwing lesbians under the bus, and arguing for the "logic of the bonobo sisterhood," when that very logic rests on a foundation of immediate gratification: seeking maximum sexual pleasure and finding it with other females.  The bonobo alliances are effect, not cause.

Rosenfeld has an whole section on the subject of compliance sex, excoriating it and expressing a longing for a social system that precludes unwanted sex.  The sad truth is that  her book is itself an artifact of compliance sex culture.

Self-defense? Check out the history of lesbians. Alliances to protect women and children? Collective self-defense? Check out the history of lesbians in any reform movement for women. Check out our history with female-only educational institutions, with the WAVES and the WAACs (female-only military branches), with the battered women's shelters, the rape crisis lines, the suffrage movement on two continents. Refusal of compliance sex? We are the champions. In fact, our resistance to unwanted sex is the source of our stigma. The very stigma that this book so rigidly and so glaringly enforces.

The Bonobo Sisterhood is a Trojan horse of a book, and I am calling the author to account for her damaging, disingenuous, homophobic, science-denial omissions and her appropriations.

Originally published in  Womanist Theory and Research, Spring/ Summer 1996, Athens, GA and and off our backs, May 1996.

Terri Lynn Jewell, a self-described "Black lesbian feminist poet and writer," died on Sunday, November 26, 1995, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Jewell's work has appeared in more than 300 publications, including Sinister Wisdom, Woman of Power, Sojourner, Kuumba, The American Voice, Calyx, The African-American Review, and The Black Scholar. Her writings have also appeared in the anthologies Riding Desire and A Lesbian of Color Anthology. Her calendar of Black women's history, Our Names are Many, is scheduled for publication by Crossing Press in 1996, and at the time of her death she was editing a collection of Black lesbian poets.

Jewell was the editor of The Black Woman's Gumbo Ya Ya (Crossing Press, 1993), an anthology of quotations by Black women. In her introduction, she writes: "This collection was born out of my personal need for affirmation as a Black woman. I needed a coping mechanism for the growing conservatism in this nation... We are all here, calling out to and reaching one another, gathering at one another's feet and sharing the sustenance that has kept us alive and moving in the directions we must go."

The quotations she selected are a testimonial to the values she expressed in her life and in her writing:

"There's nothing neat and tidy about me, like a nice social revolution. With me goes a mad, passionate, insane, screaming world of ten thousand devils
and the man or God who lifts the lid off this suppressed world does so at his peril." - Bessie Head

"From my own study of the question, the colored woman deserves greater credit for what she has done and is doing than blame for what she cannot so soon overcome." - Fannie Barrier Williams

"... victory is often a thing deferred, and rarely at the summit of courage...
What is at the summit of courage, I think, is freedom. The freedom that
comes with the knowledge that no earthly power can break you; that an
unbroken spirit is the only thing you cannot live without; that in the end it is
the courage of conviction that moves things, that makes all change possible." - Paula Giddings

Copyright 2007 Carolyn Gage
Originally published on the Ugly Ducklings Campaign Website, 2007

Originally published in Lesbian Connection, 2013

Caitlin Allen died Thursday, March 14, 2013 at the age of thirty-nine on her farm up in Starks, Maine.
 
She was an artist, a farmer, a farrier, a landscaper, and a carpenter. She moved to Maine from Pittsburgh in 1995 with her then-partner and lifelong friend Darlene Clute. They both worked with Woodfords and Community Partners, assisting developmentally disabled adults.
 
In 2000, she and her partner Jen Gilmore bought a small home in Starks, Maine. They remodeled this home and a few years later traded up to a farm with 30 acres and a barn. In addition to an assortment of cats and dogs, Barking Dog Farm would have horses, chickens, goats, turkeys, ducks… and a cow. Caitlin and Jen began a craft business, making homemade wooden lamps, and Caitlin also started an internet business of painting portraits of people’s animals. Together they launched their carpentry business, named “Women Do It Better.”

Caitlin participated in her local Big Sister program, and she would take her “little sister” on camping trips and trail rides. Her two nieces, Ariel and Mackenzie, adored her, and Mackenzie wrote in her journal: “Aunt Katy I have gotten all of my inspiration from you to be an artist now. I am following in your foot steps.”  Caitlin loved animals, especially horses, and was a skilled farrier. She could trim the hooves of the horses others were afraid to approach. Caitlin also wrote children’s books and played guitar, writing and singing her own songs.
 
She was actively engaged with lesbian culture, and she and Jen made the journey one year to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. She would contribute articles and artwork to Maize: A Country Lesbian Magazine. For several years she was a member of the Feminist Spiritual Community in Portland, Maine, participating in weekly rituals.
 
She attended the University of Maine at Farmington and was working toward completing prerequisites for veterinary school when she became overwhelmed by conditions later diagnosed as Complex PTSD.
 
Caitlin was endlessly curious about the world she lived in, tremendously loyal and generous to her friends and neighbors, community-minded, and creative. She will be deeply missed by all who knew her.

Originally published in off our backs, vol. xxxiv, 2003 Washington, DC.

I began writing and researching lesbian literature in the early 1980’s. As a playwright, I was not just looking for my history, but I was searching for different paradigms and new/old archetypes from a culture that had been buried or appropriated. The so-called “classic” dramas were male narratives, obsessed with possession and overthrow, especially of father figures. The women were obstacles, rewards, or objects of exchange in the bloody transactions between men. This was not a template I could customize by the mere switching of pronouns.
 
And, of course, the so-called universal archetypes of this drama were happy housewives, glorying in their upwardly mobile marriages, or depressing martyrs and victims. The spunky women, like the mid-life, cast-off wife Medea, go mad with jealousy and murder their own children. The women excluded from male hierarchies waste their lives in futile gestures, like Antigone. The captive, raped, colonized survivor, like Cassandra, is doomed to a post-traumatic scenario of recounting her tale of atrocity to a population who will not or cannot believe her. And so on…

This was my “heritage” as a Western playwright. Obviously, I could not tell a lesbian story with these colonial archetypes or dominance paradigms. Nor did I want to write superficial lesbian sit-coms, or endless parodies or critiques of patriarchal drama for a rising elite of post-modern, faux feminists to consume. It is, of course, impossible to ignore this toxic theatre legacy, but rather than batter at the gates of this boys’ club in vain attempts to gain entry, I wanted to look back and down on it from the perspective of a fully-realized, lesbian-centered narrative.
 
Where would I turn for my narrative histories? Where was the lesbian-feminist equivalent of the Bible, or the Koran, or the Bhagavad Gita? Where was my Iliad, my Odyssey? Who would be my Homer?
 
And this is when I discovered the writings of Monique Wittig. I found them among the used paperbacks in a women’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon. The Lesbian Body. The Guérilières. The Opoponax. Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary. Wittig was generating archetypes and paradigms. She was writing about ancient matriarchal cultures that, paradoxically, were contemporaneous with ours. She was reclaiming goddesses, students of Sappho, the Vietnamese Trung sisters of 40 AD. She was not just going back in archeological time, but she was also going back in archetypal time by re-membering lesbian childhood from the eyes of the child in The Opoponax, bringing back the magical thinking of children, where the mythical beast of resistance, the opoponax, is congruent with the intense, wonder-filled discoveries of the developing mind.

"I am the opoponax. You must not provoke him all the time the way you do. If you have trouble combing your hair in the morning you mustn't be surprised. He is everywhere. He is in your hair. He is under your pillow when you go to sleep. Tonight he will make you itch all over so badly that you won't be able to go to sleep. When dawn comes behind the window tomorrow morning you will be able to see the opoponax sitting on the window sill. I am the opoponax."
 
Wittig was writing about the fluid social configurations of women not bounded by heteropatriarchal obsessions with virginity and paternity. She was writing about the volcanic fury that formerly enslaved women direct toward each other and toward themselves:
 
"Six of the women are none too many to hold her. Her mouth is open. Inarticulate words and cries are heard. She stamps the ground with her feet. She twists her arms to free them from the grip, she shakes her head in every direction. At a given moment she lets herself fall to the ground, she strikes the ground with her arms, she rolls about shrieking. Her mouth seizes the earth and spits it out. Her gums bleed. Words like death blood blood burn death war war war are heard. Then she tears her garments and bangs her head on the ground until she falls silent, done for. Four of the women carry her, singing, Behind my eyelids/ the dream has not reached my soul/ whether I sleep or wake/ there is no rest."

She was writing an eroticism that did not privilege the genitals, one that asked us to envision lesbian sexuality in radical new ways:
 
"The kaleidoscope game consists of inserting a handful of yellow blue pink mauve orange green violet flies beneath someone’s eyelids, m/ine for instance. They are really tiny flies minute insects, their peculiarity lies in the bizarre intensity of their colours. You place them between m/y eyelid and m/y eyeball despite m/y protestations and laughter."
 
She was also celebrating women’s capacity for savagery.
 
"The women say they have learned to rely on their own strength. They say they are aware of the force of their unity. They say, let those who call for a new language first learn violence. They say, let those who want to change the world first seize all the rifles. They say that they are starting from zero. They say that a new world is beginning."
 
Wittig reclaimed and venerated the intricacies of the vulva in the “feminaries” that were distributed among the girls of in her tribe of women warriors:
 
"The women say the feminary amuses the little girls. For instance three kinds of labia minora are mentioned there. The dwarf labia are triangular. Side by side, they form two narrow folds. They are almost invisible because the labia majora cover them. The moderate-sized labia minora resemble the flower of a lily. They are half-moon shaped or triangular. They can be seen in their entirety taut supple seething. The large labia spread out resemble a butterfly's wings. They are tall triangular or rectangular, very prominent."

Then, consistent with her commitment to anarchy, she has the feminaries destroyed:
 
"The women say that it may be that the feminaries have fulfilled their function. They say they have no means of knowing. They say that thoroughly indoctrinated as they are with ancient texts no longer to hand, these seem to them outdated. All they can do to avoid being encumbered with useless knowledge is to heap them up in the squares and set fire to them. That would be an excuse for celebrations."
 
Wittig is clear that patriarchal languages is a language of ownership, and that women must resist it:
 
"The women say, the language you speak poisons your glottis tongue palate lips. They say, the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you. They say, the language you speak is made up of signs that rightly speaking designate what men have appropriated. Whatever they have not laid hands on, whatever they have not pounced on like many-eyed birds of prey, does not appear in the language you speak"
 
"The women say, I refuse henceforward to speak this language, I refuse to mumble after them the words lack of penis lack of money lack of insignia lack of name. I refuse to pronounce the names of possession and non-possession. They say, If I take over the world, let it be to dispossess myself of it immediately, let it be to forge new links between myself and the world."

Wittig worked with some of the classical goddesses and myths, envisioning her lover at a gathering with Artemis, Aphrodite, Ishtar, Persephone, and host of other female deities. She retold the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, with a female protagonist descending into hell to bring back her reluctant, self-loathing lover, who begs her at every step to abandon her to her misery. She offers a paean to Sappho, describing a violet rain that irradiates the naked body of her beloved. In Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, co-written with Sande Zeig, she not only reclaims all kinds of goddesses and mythical figures, but describes various ages (“Steam Age,” “the Concrete Age”), characterizing the present era as “the Glorious Age,” thereby attempting to perpetuate and memorialize a myth of her own making:
 
"For almost two milleniums lesbians had been represented with glories around their heads. This was mistaken for a sign of sanctity and was not yet recognized as a form of energy. When the companion lovers appeared to one another in their brilliance and were able to stand the sight, they caught and used this energy that they immediately called 'glorious.' From which comes the 'Glorious Age.'"

Wittig was, single-handedly, generating ancestral memories and cultural prototypes. She was, as she said, “Starting with zero.” And she did more than imagine a past and a future for lesbians. She realized them—that is, made them real—and then reported back to us from the center of that new reality. She was an anarchistic pioneer, smashing through men’s civilizations to reveal a primitive wildness and promise that have always existed in possibility.
 
 The obligatory and all-but-overtly sneering obituaries for Wittig in the mainstream press do not do her justice. They desiccate and desecrate her work in their attempts to get at it, but it remains inaccessible to outsiders. The succulence of Wittig’s writing is in the juice—which like the vaginal secretions she names “cyprine”– is distinctly lesbian.
 
The greatest tribute we can offer to this visionary foremother of lesbian-feminism is to take her writings to heart. And she has left us an injunction for this dazzling lesbian revolution that fluttered with such bizarre intensity behind her eyelids…

Listen:

Originally published in off our backs, March 1, 2006.

I met Tee Corinne at a women writers’ group in her home a few weeks after I moved to Southern Oregon, in 1988. I had just come out, and Tee was the first lesbian artist I had met whose art was for lesbians and from a lesbian perspective. I could not have found a more inspiring and revolutionary model.
 
Tee was born and grew up in Florida. Her mother introduced her to principles and techniques for making visual art. According to Tee, “I have seldom succeeded in keeping a diary, but I have almost always carried a drawing pad and, since, my eighth year, I have also had a camera.” 1
 
With a bachelor’s degree in printmaking and painting (with minors in English and history), she went on in 1968 to get an MFA in drawing and sculpture at Pratt Institute. After a few years of teaching and backpacking in Europe, she became attracted to the back-to-the-land movement and communal living. She was also, in her words, sliding into suicidal depression:

Something didn’t feel right. Nowadays they talk about over-achieving adult children of alcoholics and the problems they have with depression… Around the age of thirty I realized that art could no longer solve my problems… I found therapy, separated from my husband, became involved with women and joined the Women’s Movement. I felt better. 2
 
At forty-four, Tee recovered memories of being sexually molested at the age of six. .
I am coming to look on my suicidal years (13-29) through the lens of this information, and find, even then, strengths to be drawn upon: the strength of the survivor; the strength of talking which chips away at the killing silence; the knowledge of the value of my own life. It’s mine. I’ve paid for it.3

Tee’s photography traced the roadmap of her personal journey. In the early 1970’s, after moving to California, Tee began working on the San Francisco Sex Information Switchboard, where she claims she learned an appreciation of sexual information. She began researching erotic art by classical artists like Rembrandt and Michelangelo. At this time, the early Second Wave feminists were arguing that heterosexuality and erotic art objectified women, but Tee’s resistance took an alternate approach: …“sensuality at its best is transformative. If I had a sense of being in touch with God, it would be at the point of orgasm.” 4  
 
She became adept at representing lesbian sexuality in ways that would elude the male gaze. In 1982, she produced a series of photographs called Yantras of Womanlove. Concerned with protecting the privacy of her models, she used techniques involving multiple prints, solarization, images printed in negative, and multiple exposures. Tee consistently and conscientiously included women of color, fat women, older women, and women with disabilities as her subjects. Sometimes printers would refuse to print her works and art galleries would refuse to show it. In 1975, she self-published the Cunt Coloring Book, which is still in print today.
 

In the early 1980’s, Tee moved to Southern Oregon, becoming part of a community of lesbians and other women who were self-consciously creating and documenting a radical, women-only culture. Many of these women were living on “women’s lands,” rural separatist collectives and communes that had been founded in the 1970’s. She became a co-facilitator of the Feminist Photography Ovulars and a co-founder of The Blatant Image: A Magazine of Feminist Photography (1981-83). During the next decade, much of her work would focus on her experiences of growing up in an alcoholic family and being molested as a child.
 
My grandmother Mabel died when I was forty, leaving me a suitcase full of five generations of photographs… 5  Somewhere in the process of enlarging and coloring in the old photo images, I began to bring the past and present together, visually and psychically.6
 

During this period, Tee edited several anthologies of lesbian erotic fiction. As an editor, Tee was scrupulously respectful of class difference as it is reflected in writing, again modeling an authentic, not tokenized, diversity. She looked for “stories about how sexuality could work with the bodies we have, within our disparate personal histories.”7
 
In 2004, Tee’s partner of fourteen years, writer and social activist Beverly Anne Brown, was diagnosed with metastasized colon cancer and given a terminal diagnosis. Wanting to use something more immediate than darkroom techniques, Tee learned to use a digital camera and Adobe Photoshop in order to “push the polite boundaries of portraiture.”8 The result is the series “Cancer in Our Lives.”
 
After the death of her partner, Tee was diagnosed with a rare form of bile duct cancer. On August 27, 2006, she died quietly in her home. She was surrounded by a network of loving and supportive members of her community, who thoughtfully maintained a weblog in order to keep Tee’s wider, international community informed about her health.

In the monograph about her exhibit titled “Family,” Tee wrote:
 
If I look inside me, talk to the child within who, after all, is the one who originally wanted to be an artist, I find that she almost always knows how she wants my work to look: “Beautiful, in a big and powerful way.”9
 
Those words could stand as her epitaph. Tee, you will be missed.
 

Footnotes:
 
1. Tee Corinne, “Personal Statement,” http://www.varoregistry.com/corinne/pers.html
2. Tee Corinne, Family: Growing Up In an Alcoholic Family, (North Vancouver, B.C: Gallerie Publications, 1970), p. 3.
3. Ibid, p. 9.
4. Tee Corinne, interviewed by Barbara Kyne, http://www.queer-arts.org/archive/9809/corinne/corinne.html
5. Corinne, Family, p. 7.
6. Corinne, Family, p. 13.
7. Tee Corinne, Riding Desire, (Austin, Texas: Banned Books, 1990), p.viii).
8. Tee Corinne, “Colored Pictures” from “Cancer in Our Lives,” http://www.jeansirius.com/TeeACorinne/Colored_Pictures/
9. Corinne, Family, p. 13.