So, it’s finally happened. Russell Brand, comedian-turned-radical-political-podcaster, is being called out internationally for his decades-long history of sexual assault, rape, grooming, and predatory behavior toward women and girls. He was called out by an investigative article in the UK’s Sunday Times and a documentary exposé on Channel 4.
 
Here’s the Wikipedia condensed version:

Now, here’s the thing. Russell Brand has been in active recovery from substance abuse disorder—including alcohol and heroin, since he went into rehab in 2002. He’s been clean and sober for more than two decades, and he has shared publicly and generously about his journey in recovery. His book, Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions, was a best-seller. In 2005, he entered rehab in the US for sex addiction, and since then, he has been very open about the harms of pornography. In his autobiography he wrote about having drawn up an extensive ‘victims list’ of women he had “wronged” as a result of his sexual addiction.

In addition he has shared his history of sexual abuse. When he was a little boy, he was sent to a tutor who, according to Brand, "when I got a question right – by way of congratulation – stuck his finger up my arse and felt my balls."  He told his mother, who told his father, and the tutoring stopped, but nothing was ever done. When he was a teenager, his father took him on an Asian "sex tourism" holiday, and his father rented a prostituted woman to "teach him to be a man." The father stayed in the room to watch.  According to Brand, he was advised to leave his childhood abuse out of the book, but, he wrote, "The reason I left it in was because I thought, if in Chapter Four you see this happen, when in Chapter Twelve, I'm rampaging round having it off with prostitutes, you might see a corollary."

All of this is to say, I believed in Brand's recovery. My first reaction to The Times account was, "Oh, my god! He’s going to own it! He’s going to do something that none of these predators have ever done before! He’s going to model 12-Step accountability, and he’s going to do it on a public stage!  He’s going to walk his talk and set an example for the world!"

My second reaction reinforced my first:   "He's no Harvey Weinstein! He's no Bill Cosby!  The man has reinvented himself!"

Russell Brand is no longer a man-boy, mommy-shocker, BBC clown-prince, bad-boy comedian. He’s a political commentator, and an extremely competent one. He has rebranded himself as a whistleblower who is not afraid to take on the government as well as huge corporations. Some consider him the king of conspiracy theories, but, whenever I have watched his podcast, he brings the receipts, posting and citing all of his sources. Impressive. Oh, and he has attracted something like seven million followers… He is actually giving mainstream media a run for the money.

An example: There is a memorable video on Youtube of Russell Brand receiving an award at the 2013 Gentlemans’ Quarterly [GQ] Annual Man of the Year ceremony.  This ceremony is sponsored by Hugo Boss, a leading global fashion and lifestyle company. Boris Johnson, then-mayor of London, has just made a joke about the Labour Party’s lack of support for the war in Syria. So, now Brand takes the stage and says:
 
“This environment is not designed for sincerity, you realize… We will struggle if we start bringing sincerity into the situation… I’m glad to grace the stage where Boris Johnson has just made light of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, meaning that GQ can now stand for “genocide quips.” I mention that only to make this next comment a bit lighter, because if any of you know a little bit about history and fashion will know that Hugo Boss made the uniforms for the Nazis, but… and the Nazis did have flaws, but, you know, they did look fucking fantastic…”

It is you who are being called to account for your past perpetration. Like the fashion giant, you are just wanting everyone to move on and celebrate who you are today. But, there were very real victims in your past collusion with a toxic, profoundly misogynist culture. And this time, Mr. Brand, it is we the people who have the receipts. There are dozens of videos of your comedy act, your hosting, your game show participation where you parade your history of misogynist predation as if it was a joke. There are videos of you grabbing, groping, kissing women. All of which are criminal acts, you realize. And then there are the women who were part of the BBC investigation. In the week following the publication of the story, there have been a half-dozen more who have come forward. And then there is the video clip from a talk show where you brag about having just exposed yourself to a woman in a bathroom minutes before going on air. In that encounter you called her by a name that was not hers and insisted you were going to continue calling her that and that you were going to "f*** her." She was terrified. It made a great joke on air.

Surely, with all that yoga, meditation, chanting, healthy lifestyle, recovery proselytizing, and especially with all of that whistleblowing, you are going to take responsibility for your actions... After all, you have made millions--millions!—by calling out the sleazy tactics of public figures who are trying to evade public accountability!

We are looking to you not to use the same-old, same-old, banal, corporate playbook of denial, lawyering up to intimidate and discourage potential witnesses, deflecting, and—of course—throwing the women and girls under the bus. We are looking to you not to take the easy way out, the rich man’s way out—which, of course, is to retraumatize your victims by discrediting them. Surely, you’re not going to play the victim, to pretend that these women are all gold-diggers or vindictive exes.  One of them was sixteen when you were thirty!  Surely you are not going to trash the child that she was!

Surely, with all of this, Mr. Brand, you are going to show up and own everything… You can’t possibly be that big of a phony and a hypocrite, can you?  Surely, now, with two daughters of your own, you can’t model this kind of misogyny? With all your pride about your working-class background, you can’t lean into the classism behind “out-lawyering” your victims? Surely, with two decades of sharing your recovery with the public, now that it’s crunch time, you’re going to “walk the talk,” aren’t you…?  Mr. Brand…?  Aren’t you…?

No, he's not.
 
And, actually, in anticipation of this kind of exposure, Brand has already been hiring high-power attorneys to threaten former alleged victims who have attempted to go public with their personal stories of rape and predatory behavior. He’s not owning a damn thing. He appears to feel completely entitled to retraumatize these women with legal threats.

Given the opportunity to respond to the allegations before the article went to press, Brand chose not to. Instead, he made his own video on September 16:

“Obviously, it’s been an extraordinary and distressing week, and I thank you very much for your support and for questioning the information that you’ve been presented with… But amidst this litany of astonishing rather baroque attacks, are some very serious allegations that I absolutely refute… These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies. And as I've written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous… Now, during that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual… What I seriously refute are these very, very serious criminal allegations…”

Brand is revealing his defense strategy: The watchwords will be “promiscuity” and “consensual.” He is parsing his words to avoid libel. He says the “relationships” were consensual. He is not saying anything about the alleged acts. In fact, he has been accused of assault and rape within these relationships. These acts are criminal even if they transpire between married couples. He is leaning into the word “promiscuity,” which is defined as “characterized by many transient sexual relationships.” It’s also defined as “implying an undiscriminating or unselective approach.” “Promiscuity” would indicate that the only one harmed is himself, for dating women not in his league.  These words, “promiscuity” and “consensual” have been carefully chosen to counter the multiple charges of criminal behavior.

Predation, not promiscuity.  Nonconsensual, not consensual. According to the women coming forward, he ambushed women, he assaulted them, he propositioned them in the most intentionally vulgar and demeaning ways. He resorted repeatedly to coercive tactics, including emotional abuse, manipulation, physical intimidation, and force.

In addition to minimizing the allegations in his video, Brand  characterizes the professional investigation as some kind of conspiracy of “news media making phone calls and sending letters to people I know.” That’s actually what’s known in journalism as “research.” He goes on to say that it feels to him like a “serious and concerted agenda to control these kinds of [alternative] spaces and these kinds voices.” Then, to clarify, he adds, “And I mean my voice along with your voice.”  Summing up, he again qualifies his actions as promiscuous and consensual, but absolutely not criminal.   

After this, he went silent for a week as more women came forward and more criminal allegations were made. And then the hammer dropped: Youtube demonetized his channel. What does that mean? It means he can no longer earn ad revenue off his videos on that platform. (It’s estimated that he was making a million a year off Youtube ad revenue.)  In addition, his management company dropped him, his publisher is suspending any planned publications, and the remaining dates on his current tour have been postponed.

On September 22, Brand issued his second response video. In this video he is actively deploying his defense strategy: a full-throttle call to the faithful to support him as the victim of a massive, international, corporate witch-hunt that will soon engulf us all:

"By now, you're probably aware that the British government has asked big tech platforms to censor our online content and that some online platforms have complied with that request. What you may not know is that this happens in the context of the online safety bill which is a piece of UK legislation that grants sweeping surveillance and censorship powers and it's a law that's already been passed."

Yes, every citizen in the UK has reason to be very wary of this legislation. And, yes, Russell Brand has many corporate enemies. He is absolutely posing a threat to mainstream media. He is a consummate showman, and he brings that A-game to his podcast. He makes traditional broadcasters look like sleepwalkers. And his numbers (seven million) are insane. Yes, there are many powerful people who would like to see him taken down.

And, none of that invalidates the allegations by these ten women of decades-long sexual assault, rape, grooming, and predatory behavior... much of which is actually documented.

Back to this second video:  Brand directs his followers to move over to the platform Rumble, which will now be his primary platform. (Rumble has not demonetized him.) He outlines the topics of of his future broadcasts: the Trusted News Initiative he referenced earlier, the "deep state" and corporate collusion,” big pharma, media corruption and censorship. At the end, he begs his followers to stay with him as he needs them “now more than ever and more than I ever imagined I would.”

He made no mention of the allegations. It's now all completely about a global conspiracy to shut down his broadcast. 

Unquestionably, the stakes are extremely high for Brand. A public amends would be a confession of crimes, and, as of yesterday, he is already the subject of a police investigation. He stands to lose his wealth and spend the rest of his life in prison.

But the stakes are very high for his victims, and these are not just the women coming forward. The victims are also cultural. How many males modeled themselves on Brand, because they saw it worked. They saw him lifted up and richly compensated as a stud. They saw his rape jokes garnering huge laughs. How many women were silenced and disbelieved in the culture for whom he was a figurehead? 

The UK has no statute of limitations for sex crimes. Does Russell Brand want to become the test case for challenging that?  Does he want to see the UK adopt the kind of time limits for prosecution we have in the US? Because every victim in the US can tell you that these limits only protect the perpetrators. Many criminals move away from the person they used to be when they committed their crimes. Some go on to do good work. Does this mean they are no longer accountable? Brand, consistent with his perpetrations, is now marshaling his forces to set a rape culture precedent in the UK of non-accountability.

I want to say very clearly that Russell Brand is not in recovery from sex addiction. He's taken the playbook of rape culture to a new low in the last two weeks. And if his 12-Step sponsors are endorsing his decision to lawyer-up, to lie, to deny, to deflect, and to do everything he can to discredit his victims, then they are violating their own recovery just as he is violating his.

Mr. Brand, I call you out on your hypocrisy and your ongoing perpetrations. You, yes you, are part of one of the most heinous conspiracies in human history, the conspiracy to degrade, exploit, and subjugate women and girls. Your recovery is a complete sham, and however you attempt to justify your actions to yourself, all of your good works have now been utterly co-opted as part of your criminal cover-up, and they will be remembered in that light. We see you.

Much of what the media portrays as women's sexuality looks suspiciously like dissociative identity disorder.  Marilyn Monroe's seductive behaviors, for example, bear more resemblance to those of a captive child appeasing an adult perpetrator than those of a grown woman engaging in an empowering and mutually satisfying sexual interaction.  And, indeed, why wouldn’t they? 
 
The pop cultural icon for female heterosexuality spent her childhood in eleven foster homes and one orphanage.  Eleven foster homes.  One orphanage.   By her own account, she was a survivor of multiple episodes of child sexual abuse.  Her mother?  Mentally ill and committed to an asylum. Shortly after Marilyn’s fifteenth birthday,  her legal guardian Grace McKee brokered a so-called marriage for her.  In other words, Marilyn Monroe was legally prostituted as a teenager.  Before she was twenty-five, she had already made three attempts at suicide; by thirty-six, she was dead.  Marilyn called her first husband “Daddy,” she called second husband (Joe Dimaggio) “Pa,” and she called third husband (Arthur Miller) “Pops.”  Apparently it wasn’t just her heart that belonged to daddy.

But this profoundly traumatized woman who died such a tragic, early death has become, not a symbol for a movement against child sexual abuse, but an icon of female sexuality.  What does it say about popular culture that its sex goddess was a desperately unhappy, suicidal,  incest survivor with dissociative identity disorders —  a woman who was  raised homeless, abandoned by one female guardian and prostituted by another?   Can anyone really believe that Marilyn Monroe’s sexuality existed independent of her personal history —  that it was not intimately connected with behaviors learned during a childhood in which she was perpetually at the mercy of strangers, and that, rather than being an attribute of empowerment, it was more the strategy of impotence?

What have been described as “seductive behaviors,” were, in fact, an aggregate of cues developed in a perpetrator-victim scenario, and it is instructive for women to note the universality of this code among males who choose to read them at face value.  Ask these same men to imitate Marilyn Monroe’s facial expressions, postures, or speech patterns, and they will be quick to tell you how ridiculous, how childish, how undignified  they feel. 

Apparently behaviors that are seen as natural and even desirable for women, are read as degrading and absurd for men.  The mystique of femininity or the bald facts of dominance?   The sexual behavior for women that patriarchy wants to idealize is identical to that of an enslaved child. 
 
At a recent auction of her personal belongings, a pair of Marilyn’s rhinestone-encrusted, stiletto-heel pumps was sold  for $48,000.   A high price to pay for shoes, but cheap compared to the cost of walking in them.

 Originally published in Trivia: A Journal of Women’s Voices , Issue 7/8, September 2008.

A few years ago, I wrote about Marilyn Monroe’s traumatic childhood—which included being raised by a single mother who was repeatedly institutionalized for mental illness, placement in multiple foster homes, multiple incidents of child sexual abuse, and being legally prostituted at fifteen in a brokered marriage. Before she was twenty-five, she had already made three attempts at suicide; by thirty-six, she was dead. I made the argument that a woman who could have been a poster child for post-traumatic stress syndrome was being celebrated, instead, as an icon for adult female sexuality:
 
"What have been described as “seductive behaviors,” were, in fact, an aggregate of cues developed in a perpetrator-victim scenario, and it is instructive for women to note the universality of this code among males who choose to read them at face value. Ask these same men to imitate Marilyn Monroe ‘s facial expressions, postures, or speech patterns, and they will be quick to tell you how ridiculous, how childish, how undignified they feel. Apparently behaviors that are seen as natural and even desirable for women, are read as degrading and absurd for men. The mystique of femininity or the bald facts of dominance?  The sexual behavior for women that patriarchy wants to idealize is identical to that of an enslaved child."
 

Xaviera Hollander’s memoir is similarly illuminating.
 
In 1972, The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander burst onto the scene, becoming an international bestseller and launching its author into instant celebrity. The book seemed to offer proof positive that the so-called “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960’s had indeed succeeded. The publisher crowed, “Far from the conventional image of the prostitute, Xaviera is well-read, articulate, fluent in half-a-dozen languages, and bursting with charm and joie de vivre.”
 
In the book, Hollander recounted in titillating prose her experiences as a prostitute and then as a madam in New York City. It didn’t hurt sales that her appearance corresponded with the stereotype of the “blonde bombshell,” and the fact that she was from the Netherlands lent her an air of European sophistication. Hollander was lauded as a completely liberated woman whose apparently insatiable sexual appetite was nothing more than the natural expression of a healthy libido. The one episode in the book where she was beat up and very nearly murdered by a john is treated as an unfortunate and fluke event, in what was otherwise consistently characterized as an empowering and fulfilling profession.
 
The Happy Hooker sold fifteen million copies, and was made into a movie starring Lynn Redgrave. Hollander went on to write a sex advice column for Playboy, and several more books about her sexy escapades. Then, in 2002, she published a memoir that was very different from her other books. Titled Child No More, this book did not make any best-seller lists or attract any movie deals. It was, in fact, a Holocaust memoir.

Few people who remember the heyday of the Happy Hooker know that she spent the first two years of her life interned in a Japanese concentration camp during World War II. Here is her story:
 
Hollander’s mother, an Aryan, was living in Germany with her family in the 1930’s, when Hitler came to power. She became engaged to a Jewish friend of the family, but, panicking at the wedding, she ran away. A gang of Nazi teenagers cornered her on the street, beat her and stoned her, shaved her head and forced her to wear a sign with the words “Jew whore.” Her family, shocked and terrified, smuggled her into the Netherlands. Here she met and married a Jewish doctor, who was the head of a hospital in Indonesia. Their courtship had been brief, and even before they left for Surabaya, Hollander’s mother discovered that her new husband was a notorious womanizer.
 
In June 1943, Hollander was born, and two months later, she and her mother were taken to a Japanese concentration camp. Her father had already been taken prisoner. Hollander’s mother had the option of going to a camp for Aryan women, where conditions were not so brutal, but she refused to be separated from her daughter, and chose to join the Jewish women with their children.
 

Hollander was able, as an adult, to reunite with a fellow child-survivor from the camp, a woman who had been six years old at the time of her imprisonment. It seems that some of Hollander’s information about her experiences may have been augmented by what her friend could also remember.
 
Hollander recounts how she saw soldiers repeatedly caressing and fondling her six-year-old companion, who was being prostituted by her mother for food. She remembers how all the women had to crouch down “like frogs” in front of the soldiers:
 
"The women were obliged to accept all kinds of humiliation; the slightest sign of disobedience was punished with mindless severity. A favorite practice was for the man to thrust his fingers into the sides of a woman’s mouth and then tear it open from cheek to cheek, leaving a bleeding gash where there had been a mouth. As more and more savage soldiers took over guard duties, there were many who took delight in inflicting torture for its own sake. They would rip open mouths without even the justification of an act of disobedience or a glance of defiance, just as they would inflict beatings as the whim took them." (Hollander, p. 54)

Food was scarce at the camp, and the women and children were all suffering the effects of malnutrition. Some of them were starving, and women attempted to barter with smugglers for any extra provisions they could get. One woman, caught with contraband for her starving child, was burned alive. Hollander’s mother, who had smuggled diamonds into the camp by hiding them in her vagina, was also caught. She was beaten and left for dead among piles of corpses. Managing to survive, it was weeks before she was able to return to her daughter.
 
Hollander describes what may be her most intact memory:
 
"One image survives of me, a lonely, frightened child sitting on a tiny suitcase containing everything I owned, sobbing in terror as a squad of soldiers marched past, each sporting three or four watches stolen from the women, shouting strange words at the top of their voices. Kirei, kirei: bow down, bow down!  There was the uncanny sight of a group of women, bowing and frog-squatting, while on the other side of a barbed wire fence, rifles at the ready, these frightening men strode by. I burst into an uncontrollable torrent of tears. Where was my mother? No one came to dry my tears. An orphan has to look after herself. "(Hollander, p. 59)
 

Meanwhile, Hollander’s father, whom she barely met, was interned in a different camp. Also caught smuggling food, he was beaten, tortured on a bamboo rack, and subjected to electrical shock administered to his genitals.
 
The war ended and the camps were liberated, but before Hollander and her mother were reunited with her father, she suffered another traumatic experience. Climbing a dead tree, she took a fall that resulted in her groin being impaled with a dead tree branch. Taken to the hospital, she remembers there were two doctors, who playfully told her to choose which one would treat her.  Unknowingly, she chose her own father. He also failed to recognize her. 
 
He apparently performed surgery on her torn vulva, and Hollander’s memories of this episode are bizarre. She remembers his “hypnotic power,” as “magic seemed to flow from his hands as they brushed my most private region.” Whether he was sexually inappropriate or she was overlaying previous trauma memories, she would write, “… there was that peculiar attraction at first sight. And in the years that followed, the precocious eroticism his loving, skillful hands had aroused in me would develop into a powerful emotion, little short of obsession.” (Hollander, p. 71)

Such were the formative years of the “Happy Hooker:” imprisonment in a concentration camp where all the males were enemies,foreigners, and sadists, constant witnessing of torture and murder of utterly subordinated women, separation from her mother, starvation, and then an episode of genital trauma associated with incestuous affect.
 
How much of her eagerness to please men sexually could be attributed to a post-traumatic, generalized Stockholm Syndrome? Was the peculiar form of mouth torture that she noted a result of women not smiling enough at their degradation, of not appearing “happy” enough at their sexual violation?  Hollander noted that, in the camps, it was clear that some women were not starving and were visibly better off than others. Later, she would understand that these were the women who were prostituting themselves.  How deep an impression did that information make? Could her celebrated hypersexuality have been a response to inappropriate sexualization as a toddler—either in the camp or at the hands of a father whose lack of sexual boundaries was a constant source of conflict in his marriage?
 
In Hollander’s own words, “A child’s character is like clay, and my confinement in that hell behind the bamboo wall certainly molded my character.”

Originally published as "Oscar Wilde: An Ideal Gay Icon?" On the Issues, Winter, 1996, New York.

In a recent gay-and-lesbian theatre newsletter, there were two notices about Oscar Wilde.  One was recruiting petitioners for a campaign to obtain an official pardon for Wilde, and the other was recruiting support for an Oscar Wilde celebration.
 
I strongly object to Oscar Wilde's being marketed as some kind of figurehead for gay and lesbian theatre activists.  And I object to gay men's attempts to unilaterally define what is touted to the media as coalition culture.  And I object most strongly of all to what I call lesbian "theatre wives," who, for the questionable privilege of a male-funded theatre roof over their heads are willing to table women's issues in favor of those which speak to the interests of their theatre husbands.
 
Oscar Wilde is a case in point.  His "culture" - arrogantly classist, misogynist, pedophilic - shares nothing in common with lesbian-feminist values, and as lesbians we need to be knowledgeable about the facts before we join our gay brothers in celebrating as a martyr someone whom many of us would consider a criminal.

According to the record, Wilde was sent to jail because of his sexual exploitation of working-class and poverty-class child prostitutes.  It was they who presented the testimony against him, and it was their evidence that sent him to prison.
 
Furthermore, it was Wilde's homophobia that set the whole legal process in motion in the first place!  His lover's father "accused" Wilde of homosexual behavior, and Wilde, in a fit of pique and egged on by his narcissistic lover, sued the man for libel - in other words, for lying.  Hardly a stand for gay rights!
 
And here is Wilde retaining an attorney for his suit: 
 
Sir Edward Clarke advised him, "I can only accept this brief, Mr. Wilde, if you can assure me on your honour... that there is no and never has been any foundation for the charges that are made against you."  Wilde stood up and declared the charges "absolutely false and groundless."  It is important to remember that Wilde was prosecuting, and that Clarke, like most attorneys, was not interested in taking on an unwinnable case.   To his credit, Sir Edward continued to defend Wilde through his subsequent trials, even after he discovered how his client's deliberate duplicity had placed him on the losing side of a sordid and sensational case which became known as the "trial of the century."  The suit proved such a professional embarrassment to him, Clarke omitted any mention of it in his memoirs.
 
And what about his family?  Wilde was married with two children at the time that he instigated the frivolous libel suit.  It was an action taken without consulting his wife and without the funds to pay the legal fees.  Foolishly, Wilde trusted his lover to cover the costs.  After his incarceration, his creditors moved in, and his family's possessions - even the children's toys - were ruthlessly auctioned off.  His wife, compelled by the scandal to leave England, found that it was necessary to change her name and her sons' names even to obtain lodging in a foreign hotel. 

Although Constance Wilde was strongly advised to divorce her husband, he importuned her from prison, and she decided against taking such action.  In fact, she continued to demonstrate   extraordinary consideration towards the man who had shown so little for her and for their children, traveling in poor health from Switzerland to Reading Gaol in order to convey in person the news of Wilde's mother's death.  After his release from prison, Wilde proceeded to violate all of the agreements he had made with her to protect the family from any further notoriety.
 
As a footnote to the marriage, Wilde had not had sexual relations with Constance for several years.  The reason he had given was that his syphilis, which he had contracted from a prostitute during his student years and had believed to be cured, was, in fact, still virulent.  There is no evidence that Wilde ever shared this information with any of the boys with whom he had sexual relations.
 
Wilde was brought to bankruptcy while in prison when his lover's father brought suit to recover his damages from the ill-advised libel suit.  Not only did Lord Alfred, Wilde's lover, renege on his agreement to cover these costs, but as Wilde reminded him in his famous letter "de Profundis," this parsimony was all the more reprehensible, because Wilde had squandered many times that amount on Lord Alfred.

But, back to the trial...  Needless to say, the man that Oscar Wilde was suing did everything he could to prove his innocence - as most people will do when they are being sued.  And so, not surprisingly, he produced as witnesses a number of the child prostitutes whose "services" had been procured by Wilde.
 
And at this point, a number of my gay brothers will insist that I make a distinction between "child prostitute" and "teenaged prostitute."  I confess that the distinction is lost on me, and I will leave it to those for whom qualifiers of age, class, geography, period in history, etc. provide a certain rationale, if not outright justification, for a practice which is apparently so intrinsic a part of gay male culture and so violently antithetical to lesbian-feminist values.
 
Some gay brothers will also jump to Wilde's defense, claiming that the boys were being paid by the defendant to testify, either that, or cooperating with the state in order to avoid prosecution.  That some of these boys had histories of blackmailing their "clients" has also been used to discredit their testimony.  Leaving for a moment the fact that Wilde admitted to friends on several subsequent occasions that the charges had been true, let us look at these objections.

Why shouldn't these boys protect their interests against a class of sexual predators who had chosen to victimize them specifically because of their disenfranchisement both as children and as members of a profoundly oppressed underclass?  Why should anyone be surprised that Wilde's affectionately engraved cigarette cases should find their way to the pawnshop?  If, as a function of his privilege, Wilde chose to romanticize his sexually exploitive transactions - such sentimentality was hardly a luxury his victims could afford.  When wealthy members of an elite class pay bargain prices for the sexual services of children, based on the poverty-class economy of these children, -can they be surprised if the more enterprising of these boys turn around and charge them premium prices for privacy based on their economy of privilege?
 
The relationship between the john and the prostituted boy  is not a mutual one.  It is the standard method of operation for colonialists, enslavers, and pimps, to brutalize the members of an underclass created by economic and sometimes social violence, and then to point to their brutalization as a rationale for the conditions to which they are subjected.  This circular and self-serving logic is in play when Wilde's defenders attempt to discredit his victims as "blackmailers and thieves." 
 
Wilde gave a speech during the trial, which is often cited as a testimonial to his gay pride.  In fact, he gave the speech as an attempt to prove that his relations with Lord Alfred were not gay, but rather a platonic bonding between an older man and a younger man.  The context in which he framed his famous "love that dares not speak its name" speech was profoundly homophobic.

During the trial, Wilde persisted in denying any participation in homosexual activity.  Repeatedly questioned about his frequenting of a notorious male brothel, where his "companions" were children who worked as valets, grooms, and coachmen, Wilde stated that he sought the boys out, because they were "bright and entertaining," insisting that he was oblivious to class differences: "I never inquired, nor did I care, what station they occupied."  And again, "I recognize no social distinctions of any kind... "
 
This is difficult to believe when, on one occasion, Wilde picked up a boy who sold newspapers, and took him to a hotel in Brighton for a weekend.  In order to disguise the obvious nature of the relationship, Wilde bought the boy a suit of clothing with insignia that would associate him with a prestigious private boys' school.  In court, he insisted that the choice of the school's colors had been the boy's. 
 
In fact, Wilde was very class-conscious.  In "de Profundis," he told a very different story - and one in which class difference features prominently:

"People thought it was dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life... It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement.  I used to feel as a snake-charmer must feel when he lures the cobra to stir from the painted cloth or reed basket that holds it and make it spread its hood at his bidding and sway to and fro in the air...  Their poison was part of their perfection." 
 
To what does "poison" refer if not their class antagonism towards Wilde and his kind?  And what a patriarchal reversal of the power relations!  It is remniscent of the rhetoric used against incest victims, characterizing them as promiscuous and vampiric.
 
One of the boys who testified had not been procured for Wilde.  He had been employed as an office boy at Wilde's publishing firm, and Wilde had cultivated the friendship by exploiting the boy's interest in his writing.  The boy testified that he had been ignorant of Wilde's intentions, that he was traumatized by the sexual contact, and that he was subsequently fired from his job for his association with Wilde.  His emotional confusion about his victimization by a "benign" perpetrator was used against him in court as proof that he was crazy.
 
After his conviction, and halfway through his two-year prison sentence, Wilde wrote the following words in a petition to the Home Secretary.  No doubt the homophobia is exacerbated by his desire to win a pardon, but Wilde's attempt to characterize his homosexuality as a disease or the result of bad company is cowardly to say the least:

"The Petitioner... was suffering from the most horrible form of erotomania, which made him forget his wife and children, his high social position..., the honour of his name and family, his very humanity itself, and left him the helpless prey of the most revolting passions, and a gang of people who for their own profit ministered to them, and drove him to his hideous ruin."
 
Hardly a gay rights manifesto. 
 
And after prison?  Wilde went to Paris, where he rendez-voused with Lord Alfred, who was being serviced sexually at the time by a fourteen-year-old boy who sold flowers on the street.  This boy claimed to be "keeping" a twelve-year-old at home, and Lord Alfred was attempting to gain sexual access to the boy.  Wilde himself, in the words of his lover, was "hand in glove with all the little boys on the Boulevard." 
 
I cannot imagine a lesbian couple deliberately choosing a vacation spot where economic violence and/or colonization has created an underclass of girls who are coerced into selling their bodies to wealthy women tourists.  I cannot imagine this loving lesbian couple buying these little girls and exploiting their poverty for the purposes of sexual self-gratification.  And I cannot imagine two lesbians experiencing this exploitation as a pleasurable and harmless recreational activity around which they could bond. 

And yet this is the kind of vacation activity in which such gay male luminaries as Andre Gide, Tennessee Williams, and Oscar Wilde would habitually indulge.
 
Oscar Wilde was a pedophile, a woman-hater, a colonialist, a classist, a coward, and a colossal liar.  The record speaks for itself. I call upon my gay brothers to drop the euphemisms surrounding the culture of prostitution and child sexual abuse, and to come out of denial about the nature of the men who participate in that culture. 

[If you found this blog interesting, I have another about Wilde...  "Oscar Wilde:His Father's Son."]

                                                                           

Frans de Waal, Dutch primatologist extraordinaire, has written a book that I found important enough to write a blog about. It’s titled Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.
 
        Calm Down...
 
And before you go all ape on me, let me say that Dr. de Waal does not justify human gender relations, nor does he think that things are fine as they are. He tells us upfront that the whole idea of one sex being mentally superior receives zero backing in modern science. Male supremacy is not a natural order among primates. In fact, he tells us, typical primate society is, at heart, a female kinship network run by older matriarchs. But, on the other hand, de Waal is not a proponent of neo-creationism either. He is clear that humans are subject to the laws of nature, and that evolution did not screech to a halt when humans arrived. Humans are animals, and—specifically—we are primates. Hence the relevance of studying and understanding primate behaviors.

Right out of the gate, de Waal disabuses readers of the false notions and the bad science that have taught us that our closest primate relatives are chimpanzees. In fact, the bonobos—also in the ape family—are equally as close, having split off from the family tree at the same time as the chimps—namely, two million years ago. (We humans split off six million years ago.) Yes, it’s true that chimps are aggressive, territorial, and that the males rule. On the other hand, the bonobos are peaceful, sex-loving, and the females dominate.  We humans are just as likely to take after them, evolutionarily speaking. So why have the chimps gotten so much more press than the bonobos?  Well, the chimp was discovered first, and bonobo behaviors challenge all the central tenets of patriarchy. Also, anyone filming a documentary about bonobos has to contend with their ongoing and unrestrained sexual activity. In terms of popular science, that’s a serious PR issue. 
 
But… back to the point of this blog: De Waal believes that the best way to achieve gender equality is to learn more about our primate biology and not to sweep it under the rug. Now, HOLD UP!
 
Yes, I am well aware that those who are seeking gender equality often find biology inconvenient. Yes, I understand that it can be politically expedient to downplay sex differences. And yes, I also understand how science has been and still is hijacked by ideology. I wrote an entire play about the pseudo-science of eugenics and how it has been historically embraced by genocidal regimes seeking to justify their atrocities. [In McClintock's Corn] And… at the same time, I am of the generation that zealously pursued and still pursues a biological basis for homosexuality and transgender identity in our bids for mainstream acceptance. So… it is with caution that I share the author’s conviction that “Instead of giving ideology precedence over science, we first need to get the science of gender in order. Ideally, we’d study this topic free from ideology.” The operative word here is “ideally,” but is that even possible, given the power of implicit bias? Maybe not, but I feel it’s worth a try, and, hence, this blog.

De Waal’s disclaimers:  He is looking at human behavior that is related to primate behavior, and in doing that, he is going to look at the literature on human behavior. He does not trust self-reports, but prefers the studies of tested and observed actual behavior. Omissions, he warns, will include: economic disparity, household labor, access to education, and cultural rules for attire. Now, obviously, these are huge influencers in the ways that gender plays out in human societies, but they are not universal for other primates… hence the omission. And, yes, I still think his book is valuable.
 
So enough taxiing down the runway. Let’s get to it…
 
                                                   Nature or Nurture?
 
So, right out of the gate, “Is it nature or nurture?”
 
Many humans assume that we socialize our children via the toys we select for them. But de Waal comes to a different conclusion from studying young primates: Play cannot be dictated. Confronted with a pile of random toys, young female primates overwhelmingly prefer plush toys and young males are attracted to things with wheels. Given a toy train, a young female will swaddle it and carry it around like a baby. According to the author, there is “consistency in finding a sex difference in the preferences for toys typed to their gender,” and he concludes that “the strength of this phenomenon points to the likelihood of a biological origin.” Notice the extreme carefulness of the language here. He must know the same people I do.  One of the most dramatic differences is in the play itself. The males enjoy roughhousing, but the females do not. They enjoy a form of play that has a storyline. Because of this, the two sexes practice segregated play.

So, does this mean nature trumps nurture? De Waal answers the question with another question: “Is a percussive sound made by the drummer or the drum?” Obviously, the answer is “both,” because on their own neither makes the sound. One could say the environment “plays” on our genes, as it were. This is “interactionism,” which assumes a dynamic interplay between genes and environment. Interactionism is not popular, because it does not offer easy answers. I’m going to say that again: Interactionism is not popular, because it does not offer easy answers.
 
“Every human tendency, regardless of whether we rate it as natural, can be amplified, weakened or modified by culture. If the gallons of ink spilled on the biological basis of altruism, homosexuality, and intelligence has taught us anything, it’s that every human trait reflects an interplay between genes and environment.”
 
Okay, let’s take language.  Adopted babies will speak the language of their adoption… obviously a cultural/environmental phenomenon. On the other hand, human language faculty is unique among primates, and that uniqueness is biological. So… nature and nurture.
 
Another quick example:  The Pill. It changed the biology of females so radically, that the entire cultural playing field was and still is (I hope) permanently reshaped.

Here’s another useful term: “learning predisposition.” What that means is being programmed to learn certain things at a particular time in our life. Like the way baby ducklings imprint. At a young age, they learn to identify with the species to which their mother belongs and follow her around—an obvious plus for survival. But when the mother duck is absent, these ducklings can imprint on a human caregiver, or a dog, or a goose, which may be less adaptive, but does result in a plethora of adorable Youtube videos. 
 
By the way, primate infants are extremely vulnerable, and newborns will die within twenty-four hours without intensive caregiving. Yes, males could provide some of this caregiving, especially with older babies, and sometimes they do take on that role with orphaned chimps… but there is only one sex that is 100% guaranteed to be present at the time of birth: the female. (Because, duh, she’s having the baby. Also, human fathers are the only primates who understand the mechanics of biological fatherhood. The concept is lost on male chimps and bonobos.) Because of this, it’s an obvious choice on the part of evolution to equip females with built-in “learning predispositions” for caregiving. “No person currently walking the earth could have gotten here if it weren’t for ancestors who survived and reproduced. No exceptions. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be here. Their genes are not in the gene pool.” (Consider the offspring of a female with a genetic makeup completely lacking in maternal predispositions. Brilliant as she might be, her offspring are not likely to survive, and her brilliance dies with her… unless she can write for a species that can read.)
 
The author makes the point that human gender roles are subject to similar “learning predispositions,” but, at the same time, he notes, “Roles may not be biological, certainly in all their details, but they are culturally acquired with a speed, eagerness, and thoroughness that hints at a biologically driven process.” Interactionism. See, we can get through this.

We just looked at maternal caregiving.  What about other expressions of gender? Let’s look at neuroimaging studies. (“Neuroimaging” means producing images of the brain by noninvasive techniques. It enables studies of a living brain, as opposed to dissection.) So… neuroimaging studies of humans indicate that imitating people of one’s own sex activates reward centers in the brain. Primate science. Evolution equipped our young with a feel-good bias to conform to the gender associated with their sex. Why? Because in primate societies the roles for males and females are very different throughout their lives. We know from studies that male chimps and bonobos strive for status and territory. We know from studies that the female apes protect and nurture their young for years. (See above.) And we also know that ideology has nothing to do with it. We know this is about sex at birth. It’s about preservation of the gene pool, which means optimizing the chances for the offspring to survive. And primate babies, including humans, take a long time to grow up.
 
“Children self-socialize via selective attention, imitation, and participation in particular activities and modality of interaction.” In primate societies, for example, chimp daughters watch and learn how their mother’s extract termites (to eat). This is a sex-segregated skill related to their role as feeders and nurturers of their offspring. Likewise male chimp infants seek male models. At first glance, teaching and learning may appear to be purely cultural and not biological in origin, but let’s not forget those internal reward centers for same-sex imitation. Primates are wired to copy those with whom they bond and identify, i.e., the members of their sex. The drummer and the drum.

De Waal notes that most differences across the sexes are bimodal (either male or female) but differences between genders present across a spectrum. Our current culture has become deeply polarized around this issue. We either want to staple a rigid set of gender roles firmly to biological sex, which is overwhelmingly bimodal, or else we want to flow with the fluidity of gender and downplay biological sex altogether, declaring it to be irrelevant. We do this at our peril, because in patriarchy, this approach has disastrous consequences for females. The consequences of gender role enforcement are also disastrous. But this is what we do, because interactionism is hard.
 
Also, science hasn’t always been scientific. Like many of us, science has found interactionism too hard. It has tended to ignore sex differences for a long, long time. In other words, ignore women. Finally, mercifully, this is starting to change. This neglect has been catastrophic for women, from barbaric male-dictated birthing practices, to male-modeled crash test dummies, to failure to study the impact of medications and vaccines on women’s reproductive systems. Remember thalidomide and the courageous woman in the FDA who, at great risk to her career, insisted on fetal studies of the drug before she would license it? Turns out thalidomide was responsible for a nightmare array of birth defects, and the horror of it was that it was being prescribed specifically as a sleep sedative to pregnant women who were struggling with insomnia related to the pregnancy!

So humans are animals. We share at least 96% of the same DNA as chimps and bonobos. In fact, we are so close in DNA that some have suggested that our genus should be merged with that of chimps and bonobos. We aren’t fond of this fact.  We tend to focus on the tip of the genetic iceberg—the ways in which we differ from the great apes—instead of the huge amount we have in common with them. But if we want to be scientific—as in biology, medicine, and neuroscience—we need to study the entire iceberg. And the human brain, although relatively large, barely differs from an ape brain in structure and neural chemistry. Again, why I wanted to blog about this book.
 
                     Red Hot Contemporary Gender and Orientation Topics
 
So what does a primatologist have to say about one of the hottest gender topics in contemporary culture… transgender identity?
 
First, De Waal notes that he has observed a female chimp whose behaviors might be considered analogous to that of a trans boy.  He describes his observations of this chimp, who, from an early age, imitated male behaviors and preferred the company of male peers. Throughout her life, this female remained somewhat of an outsider to both genders, because she never became a mother, but she was not included in the male hierarchy either. This was, in part, because she, unlike the males, did not exhibit violent behaviors. In spite of these differences, the tribe had no problem accepting her. Side note: There are no reported instances of rejection for sexual orientation or gender expression among primates… oh, except, for us.

 Being a scientist, De Waal puts forward a theory about the science of transgender identity and behavior: “One speculation is that in a fraction of human pregnancies, the body takes off in a different direction than the brain. A fetus’ genitals differentiate into male and female during the first few months of pregnancy, whereas the brain differentiates by gender in the second half of pregnancy… Gender identities are probably shaped in the womb from hormonal exposure. Experience after birth seems to have little impact. This could explain why no amount of conversion therapy, combined with prayer and punishment, changes the minds of transgender persons… Not every human trait is malleable.”
 
Here, he is actually drawing on science. Human brains are not gender neutral. Again, nature or nurture?  Are our brains different because of hormones or experiences? Or both? Currently we don't know, but it’s a thoroughly established fact our brains are sexually dimorphic. What does that mean?  Sexual dimorphism is the “systematic difference in form between individuals of different sex in the same species.” Specifically, some parts of the male and female brain differ from each other in size or appearance. And before you accuse me of “neurosexism” or come at me about “lady brains,” there are more than 20,000 scientific articles documenting sex difference in human brains. Should it be unthinkable that this dimorphism might have some evolutionary connection?  I’m going to keep an open mind on the subject, and I found De Waal’s speculation interesting.

So what about homosexuality? The bonobos, as noted, are extremely sexually active, and their partnerings are often with members of the same sex. In fact, three quarters of bonobo sex could not result in procreation (same-sex, too old, or too young partners). Interestingly, the levels of oxytocin, the “love drug,” are higher in the urine of female bonobos after sex with another female. Enhanced oxytocin production has been seen as a hormone to facilitate childbirth, but possibly its bonding function in some primates is significant. (Footnote: As De Waal points out, there are no species other than humans that are truly "homosexual," as in exclusively attracted to members of one's own sex. And, yes, that includes those famous male penguins at the Central Park Zoo.)

What about the chimps?  Same-sex partnering among chimps was thought to be rare until recently. Today it is reported as frequent. What changed? Definitions and attitudes.  Today studies include sociosexual behavior, which is defined as “physical interaction involving contact with the anogenital region except for mating/copulations."  In the past, these behaviors had been dismissed as  “reassurance” or “reconciliation,” or “gestures.” Today they are acknowledged to be sexual.

Nature or nurture? The author explores the literature about brain studies exploring structural differences in the brains of gays and lesbians. He sites the work of Ivanka Savic and Per Lindström, who were studying human brain symmetry, which has no relationship to behavior, is fixed at birth, and is not altered by life experiences.  Their work indicates that sexual orientation may be forged in early infancy or even in the womb. But the primate culture of the great apes certainly doesn't discourge same-sex partnering.

                                         Violence Against Women
 
Much of de Waal’s focus is on primate violence in general, and, human violence against females in particular. Studies show that primates resolve conflicts, sympathize with each other, and seek cooperation. Both human children and primates demonstrate spontaneous altruism without enticements. Bonobos are taken as proof that violence is not hard-wired in, and most of the time both chimps and bonobos live in harmony. That actually goes for humans, also. Philosopher Mary Midgeley, who wrote about the relations of humans and animals, notes that humans are ultra-social, with communal values, even though we have a body of literature by men and for men depicting us as greedy individualists with only a veneer of goodness.  Propaganda?
 
There are no confirmed reports of bonobos killing each other, but there are many cases where chimps have ganged up and murdered male members of their tribe, sometimes brutally. Remember, the bonobos are sexy, peaceful, and female dominant. Male chimps also commit infanticide, and female chimps copulate widely to ensure protection of the young. Yes, these females have sex for excitement, attraction, adventure, and pleasure, but always behind it lies the threat of infanticide. If a male is bonded with the female through sex, he is less likely to murder her baby. (Again, he has no notion of fatherhood.) And, sadly, we have to include humans as among the species that commit infanticide. (Others include lions, dolphins, bears, prairie dogs, and owls. I know… dolphins?) Our infanticide? Step-fathers murder step-children with more frequency than the biological fathers. War is a large-scale scenario where the older father figures routinely send out the younger males to kill other younger males and to be killed. Why? Less competition for these aging males.
 
Female chimps receive more favors when they are in estrus, which is marked by highly visibile swelling of their genitalia. They barter sex for favors. The female bonobos, on the other hand, never threatened with infanticide or male violence, simply claim what they want, which happens to be an enormous amount of sex… with both males and females.

The author notes that female sexuality among both species is as proactive and enterprising as that of the males… but for different evolutionary reasons. And here is a fascinating side note about the bonobos:  During sex, the male will stop thrusting and dismount  if the female is avoiding eye contact or signals boredom by yawning or grooming. The bonobos demonstrate a clear grasp of the female’s right to change her mind. Sigh.

Which takes us back to the subject of human male violence against females: “If there is one aspect of social life that is gender-biased, it is physical violence. Males are its overwhelming source, and it applies equally to most other primates.” Statistics show that 22.1% of women and 7.4% of men have been victims of male violence. 13.5% of all human homicides are male-perpetrated, sex-based hate crimes against women. HOWEVER, these stats don’t take into account the massively under-reported incidence of “domestic violence.” With this epidemic murder of females, humans really stand out from other primates, even the chimps. 

Chimps do physically abuse and harass females, but they do not rape or murder them . And, of course, the male bonobos learn early that they will get the you-know-what slapped out of them by the adult females if they even THINK about messing with them. Also, the bonobo females travel together and sleep within earshot of each other, both of which are huge curbs to male violence. Groups of both bonobos and chimps are sex-segregated: “Males and females dwell in different worlds, each with its own set of issues.” Among primates, males compete with males and the females compete with females. (Among the chimps, the male bonding is stronger and they prefer it.) The sexes only meet occasionally and mating is done in the open, where others can interfere.
 
On the other hand, humans integrate the sexes into a single framework… often the “nuclear home.”  This arrangement facilitates male control and abuse. (This level of sex integration is relatively recent, having intensified during the Industrial Age.) The author reminds us that during COVID, where people were compelled to isolate within their homes, reports of domestic violence tripled.

So, rape.  Male orangutangs rape, and so do male ducks. Oh, and male scorpion flies. And then, of course, human males. What percentage of men are rapists?  Speculation varies… 1 in 5? 1 in 10? 1 in 20?  The frequency and prevalence of rape are staggering in our species. Some will say that rape is an evolutionary “adaptive strategy” to maximize fertilization, but if this is so, then why is it so extremely rare among all the species on earth? And it’s not “adaptive.” If it were, there would be no raping of girls, wives, post-menopausal women, or males. But here we are… Furthermore, tribal studies show an intolerance of the behavior, because in tribes there is physical proximity of kin, less female dependence on men, and less male bonding. Possibly, if chimps were forced out of tribes and into suburban cages with a lone female partner, they would begin to rape and murder females. Nature or environment?
 
But De Waal is careful to point out that biology is not irrelevant in considering violence against women. Sons, as he says, are not daughters. Sons will grow up more prone to violence. Sons will have more bodily strength.

Let’s take a sec with this, because it’s a huge part of the current gender controversies. Are human males stronger? So… “constitutional body strength.”  1% of women can lift 110 pounds directly off the ground. Two thirds of men can. Hand grip strength is another test that bypasses athletic training and fitness. 90% of young females fall short of 95% of men. Significant and documented difference.    
BECAUSE this is true, De Waal posits, we need to teach emotional skills and attitudes, and we need to offer healthy outlets for aggression. And, I would add, a good long look at alternate living arrangements that ensure safety for women and children.

                                                  How Primates Interact
 
Among chimps and bonobos, the males are pack animals, while the females prefer serial one-on-one friendship. The boys enjoy quarrels about rules, but quarreling ends the game for girls. They distance themselves from adversaries, while the males adopt a “nothing personal” attitude. In fact, male opponents actually seek each other out.
 
All social mammals practice reconciliation. Among chimps, 47% of the males reconcile. Only 18% of the females do. The males are opportunistic and keep their options open. Four out of five female conflicts go unreconciled. In sum, the males are good at making peace. The females are good at suppressing conflict. On the other hand, female bonobos don’t hold grudges and can actually make up in the middle of a fight. In conflict, two female chimps will be screaming in anguish. When male chimps fight, only one party screams—the loser.
 
Sadly, we resemble male-bonded apes more than the matricentric bonobos. Also sadly, primate dimorphism tends to stick in our subconscious. We respect height, muscularity, and low voices. (I’ve seen that in theatre for decades.) How can we change this? De Waal recommends an appreciation for the evolutionary roots of these biases, not a denial of them. Amen. Hence the blog.

                                                            Mothers
 
Some observation of primate motherhood: “Maternal attachment is the mother of all bonds.” The maternal bond in primates is the crucible for evolution of social intelligence.
 
And here we run into the traditional sexism of scientists. They have historically considered altruism to be a “puzzle,” insisting that animals have no reason to worry about others. Obviously, they were discounting mothers with infants, which is, in De Waal’s words, insane.  Female primates care for babies. Female juvenile primates are three-to-five times more apt to do mothering, which decreases infant mortality. Duh. Maternal care goes far deeper than prejudice and gender expectation. Females have more emotional empathy, but the same amount of cognitive empathy as males.
 
Primates respect motherhood. Female status changes when are pregnant. Also primates offer support for miscarriages. Motherhood is a really big deal, biologically speaking. 

                                              Power vs. Leadership
 
Both female chimps and female bonobos demonstrate leadership. Also, a small male chimp can outrank larger and more powerful males in the hierarchy. Why aren’t these dynamics more documented in the literature?  Because: 1) Males are more flamboyant. 2) Males are violent. 3) As noted, bonobo documentaries are X-rated and less broadcast. 4) Researchers tend to equate social dominance with physical dominance. This is a grave mistake, because it omits networking, personality, age, strategic skills, and family connections… huge factors in leadership, and skill sets at which females excel. Prestige, rarely taken into account in these studies, is defined as a power that comes from being admired. The power of prestige can be enhanced with age, even as physical prowess declines.
 
The dominant male may keep the tribe together, but the alpha males teach the young males boundaries and impulse control. The presence of these alpha males actually suppresses production of hormones among the other males.

                                                         Summing Up
 
We are primates through and through.
We navigate a world of primarily two sexes.
We can never fully disentangle the cultured category of gender from the biological one of sex—and the bodies, genitals, brains, and hormones that come with it.
 
We have not escaped forces of evolution.
 
And here are my own thoughts in summation: Denial of these tenets leads us further and further away from effective strategies, policies, and coalitions to resolve issues of justice and equity, which require interactionism. Which is both hard and necessary.
 
 

Here’s the problem.  Amber Heard presented two photos as evidence that she was a victim of battering. They were actually the same image, but one of them had been edited. When cross-examined about this, she insisted that they were two separate photos. She said that she took the first photo, and then turned on a light and took the second photo. Hmm… Then the photos were displayed to the court with their time stamps. They were both taken at exactly the same second. Exactly.

So Ms. Heard explained how she took the first photo, then broke the pose to turn on a light, and then got back in exactly the same pose to take the second photo… all of this in less time than one second. The same identical angle, the same identical expression, the same identical placement of every single hair. What she was asking us to believe was impossible. It was, to put it bluntly, a lie. We all had eyes. We were all looking at the photos, at the time stamps. We all knew how brief one second is. Did she take us for idiots?  And if she had no difficulty presenting us with such a blatant, demonstrable lie, how could we believe anything else she said, especially if it was a lie that might help her case?

At this point some of us were remembering her inadvertently disclosing to the court that she owned a “bruise kit.” What is a “bruise kit” you may ask…. Well, it’s a “cosmetic item that comprises a disc with many color palettes, including red, burgundy, violet, purple, yellow, and sallow green compacts. As per the Ben Nye Makeup Company, the wheel is made up of hues that closely resemble the color seen in bruises and skin abrasions.” Actors use bruise kits to make themselves look bruised. Heard told us she owned one. And then she quickly disavowed it.
 
Ms. Heard could have made a different choice when she was caught submitting an edited photo as evidence. She could have said, “Yes, it is the same image, but since this is such an important piece of evidence, I edited it to better delineate the bruise on my cheek.” Some of us might have still been skeptical. Some of us might have thought, “Well, that makes sense. She’s entitled.” Some of us might have wondered, “Is that even allowed?”  But there would have at least been some wiggle room.

What Ms. Heard told us was such a blatant lie, it insulted our intelligence. And this happened over and over again during the course of the trial. She would be challenged about something she said or something she presented as evidence, and in order to defend it, she would generate a whole new string of lies, usually more implausible than the original. She did this with her lie that she had donated all the money from her divorce settlement to charity. Though not included in the trial, she did it when confronted about her arrest and her night in jail for domestic violence. She did it when caught with falsified papers, attempting to smuggle her dogs into Australia. She did it with her version of how part of Mr. Depp’s finger was severed.
 
And then, after all these documented inconsistencies and contradictions, there is the issue of how much she asks us to take her at her word...The complete absence of medical records of injuries from alleged years of horrific battery and rape that would go on for hours and days. The lack of witnesses, apart from a sister who, according to a court declaration, was herself a victim of Heard’s violence. The lack of photographic evidence—apart from the bruise photo— when there are dozens of photographs of spilled wine, broken glass, defaced mirrors, lines of cocaine, Mr. Depp passed out/sleeping. And there is the videotaping of his behavior without permission. It’s not like Ms. Heard was shy about documenting. Why didn’t she just step in front of the mirror when she photographed it? The photographs she submitted as proof of injury in no way matched the narratives of extreme violence that she described. Not even close.

The UK trial admitted therapy records into evidence as “medical records.” In the US, therapy  records are considered hearsay--which they are--and, as such, they are rightfully disallowed. The judge in the UK trial, a man who had personal and professional connections with the publication being sued and who would have been disqualified as a juror in the US, relied on Ms. Heard’s word to reach a verdict. The US jury did not. I feel it's worth noting that the judge believed at the time, as did the rest of the world, that she had already donated her seven-million-dollar divorce settlement to charity. Because she had said so, repeatedly.
 
Look, many of us who followed this trial are survivors.  And many of us were abused by people who lie. Our responses to lies and liars can be skewed by this experience. I remember my mother explaining to my father that I had broken the back window of our station wagon. I was probably ten, or younger. The window had somehow been rolled up not in the track, and forced so badly that it would not roll up or down anymore. I hadn’t done it. I was confused. How could I have forgotten doing that? Did she mistake someone else for me? And why was she being all giggly about it?  Today I understand that my mother broke the window and lied about it, because she was terrified of my father, and she was probably high. Maybe she thought my father would be less angry at a child. Whatever she was thinking, she counted on my loyalty in that moment, and I did not disappoint.

I knew I had not broken the window. I knew my mother was saying something that she knew was not true. I did what many survivors learned to do. I refused to connect the dots. Connecting the dots would leave me with one of two conclusions: “I must be crazy” or “My mother is a dangerous liar.”  So I just turned on the internal fog machine that so many abused children have learned to deploy. I let the testimony of my own experience and the lie of my mother coexist, unconnected, in my brain. I needed to believe my mother, because my father was terrifying. That was my overriding ideology: Trust my mother.
 
But I’m not a child anymore. I have disabled the fog machine, in spite of the fact that this complicates my life. I have had to ditch the ideology that kept me from connecting the dots. In recovery, there are no ideologies that justify sacrificing my experience of what is true.

Amber Heard has just lied to a courtroom, to a jury, and to me about a piece of critical evidence. And it’s obvious to everyone watching.  Yes, I want to believe survivors. I have written the largest canon of plays dealing with violence against women of any playwright in the English-speaking world. I am a survivor. I have skin in this game.  And among many feminists, especially feminist activists, there is an ideology about always believing women who claim to be abuse victims.

But Amber Heard has just lied and I saw her do it.  I no longer have a way to let that coexist in my brain with believing her. The dots connect themselves these days: She lied; therefore she is a liar; therefore she is not to be trusted.

And these dots also simultaneously connect up: This is a really, really inconvenient truth in a world where there is finally a global movement of women coming forward to name powerful men as perpetrators. The vast majority of perpetrators of violence against women are, of course, men. And it’s  a really, really inconvenient truth that otherwise powerful men can occasionally be victims of domestic violence at the hands of women.

But... any movement that purports to be for survivors, and at the same time demands that its followers disbelieve the testimony of our own eyes, demands that we give liars a pass on their documented deceptions, and that demands of male survivors impossibly high standards for evidence--even in just one instance--is a movement that lacks credibility. Because that's how lying works.

About 35 years ago, I got the idea of building a museum to commemorate and honor women who are victims of rape. I was inspired at the time by the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. I eventually published "The Women's Rape Museum" as a blog on this site.

Because of this blog, two architecture students from the University of San Carlos in the Phillippines reached out to me, asking me to be a consultant on their thesis project, which was to design a museum for survivors of sexual violence. The two students were Allen Celestino and Fairyssa Biana Canama... and they did an incredible job with their project, titled "Walls of Silence: A Survivor's Museum." It was designed for a site in Cebu City, but it could and should serve as a model for similar museums in any city.

Celestino and Canama studied a range of Holocaust and war memorial museums, and came up with a design that would take visitors on a healing journey through the different stage of assimilating the trauma of rape. To aid in the presentation of their thesis, they made a beautiful short video that takes the viewer on a graphic tourof the various passages and chambers of this architectural journey.

Their video journey is only 3.5 minutes long... and well worth the viewing! They have broken down the chaotic and inchoate process of healing from post-rape trauma, helping the victim access an experience that too often is an internal and unassimilated secret.

The genius of their project is that this is also a healing and integrating experience for the friends and families of survivors, who often have no idea what their loved one is going through. In this museum experience, they can literally accompany them through these externalized stages, offering enormous opportunity for dialogue and empathy. 

For those who are interested in the process behind their choices, their half-hour thesis presentation is fascinating and also available online.  (It includes the shorter video of the museum tour.) Both Celestino and Canama come out as survivors in their video, and their design process reflects their constant engagement with their own experiences.

I encourage survivors and those who love us to take the short tour of Walls of Silence, and then the longer tour of the thesis presentation. I encourage all of us begin to think more deeply about the needs of survivors in our culture and ways to bring this tangible, visible proof of caring to our communities.

In the annals of theatre history, Green Grow the Lilacs by Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs is mostly known as the play upon which the blockbuster Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! Is based.

That’s ironic, because the musical actually subverts the radical paradigm that Riggs has so beautifully crafted. Perhaps that kind of dramaturgical subversion is inevitable any time a Native writer’s work is adapted for mainstream commercial purposes. Also, the American musical is probably not the best vehicle for exploring the moral ambiguities and contradictions that are intrinsic to Riggs’ depiction of frontier life in what he specifically designates as “Indian Territory”—in other words, not the state of Oklahoma. Finally, Riggs is not only writing about colonization of Indian Territory, but also about colonization into heteropatriarchal values through a particular community ritual called "shivaree."  The musical completely subverts the nature of that ritual and its pivotal role in Green Grow the Lilacs.

But first, let's look at the appropriation of Indian Territory:

What exactly was Indian Territory in 1900, the year the play takes place?  It was, according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica:  

"…originally ‘all of that part of the United States west of the Mississippi, and not within the States of Missouri and Louisiana, or the Territory of Arkansas.’ Never an organized territory, it was soon restricted to the present state of Oklahoma, excepting the panhandle and Greer county. The Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, and Chickasaw tribes were forcibly moved to this area between 1830 and 1843, and an act of June 30, 1834, set aside the land as Indian country (later known as Indian Territory)… In 1866 the western half of Indian Territory was ceded to the United States, which opened part of it to white settlers in 1889. This portion became the Territory of Oklahoma in 1890 and eventually encompassed all the lands ceded in 1866. The two territories were united and admitted to the Union as the state of Oklahoma in 1907."

Yes, Indian Territory is on the brink of statehood in 1900, when the play opens, but Riggs makes clear this is not something about which the prairie folks are enthusiastic. Here is Aunt Eller’s speech to her neighbors from the end of the play: “Why, the way you’re sidin’ with the federal marshall, you’d think us people out here lived in the United States! It’s jist a furrin country to me. And you supportin’ it! Jist dirty ole furriners, every last one of you!”

And her neighbors are quick to respond: “My pappy and mammy was both borned in Indian Territory! Why I’m jist plumb full of Indian blood myself.” “Me, too! And I c’n prove it!”

In most productions, the characters of the play are presumed to be settlers, but Riggs tells us in the dialogue that they are, in fact, “full of Indian blood” and proud of it.

So... on to the issue of the shivaree, a traditional frontier ritual involving males in the community kidnapping, harassing, and terrorizing  newlyweds on their wedding night.

The shivaree as depicted in Oklahoma! has become sanitized and civilized, so that it is little more than an extension of the wedding party… kind of like when the bridesmaids and groomsmen sneak off to tie old shoes onto the back of the newlyweds’ car. The musical has transferred the scene from the dead of night to broad daylight. Shivarees are traditionally done in the dark. In the musical, just after the ceremony,  the bride tosses her flowers over her shoulder, and then exits to change into her traveling clothes. The groom leaves to pack, and the men announce that they plan to have a shivaree. There is a vaudevillian interlude featuring a henpecked husband, and then the men return with pots and pans, making a racket. As the bride and groom exit for their travels, the men hoist the groom amiably on their shoulders… but whatever good-natured hazing they have planned is interrupted by the arrival of Judd Fry, the villain of the piece. Wielding a knife, Judd goes to attack the groom and a fight ensues that ends in Fry’s death. The shivaree has been reduced to a noisy, fraternal, daytime bon voyage party for the newlyweds.

Th shivaree in Riggs play is something completely different. It is a terrifying artifact of rape culture, and it serves to traumatize and permanently alter both protagonists in ways that are resonant with the appropriation of Indian Territory.  To understand its dramaturgical significance, it’s important to look at the origins of the custom:

“Charivari” dates all the way to medieval and early modern Europe, where it was a ritual used to punish members of a community who failed to conform to social norms, especially sexual norms. Targets of the charivari might include a widow who remarried, a wife who assaulted her husband, or a couple who failed to have children. In France, where the term originated, teenaged boys and unmarried men traditionally led the ritual, parading through the streets, shouting mocking insults, beating on pots and pans, and threatening violence. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, these males would also attack local brothels during Lent. If the victim paid his or her tormentors off with money or wine, the charivari might end without these threats being carried out.  

Apparently, until two hundred years ago, most Europeans thought the charivari was a legitimate and effective practice for curbing social deviance. It allowed for a public venting of outrage, with the opportunity for a “peaceful” resolution of a potentially explosive situation. In other words, it served as a kind of communal vent for blowing off steam… an exorcism of deviance. The victims were shamed, but then reintegrated into the community.

Here’s the thing: It’s actually a rape culture ritual empowering young males to assert their primacy and dominance in the community, and especially with regards to widows who dare to remarry, women who most likely were just attempting to defend themselves in abusive marriages where their husbands had legal rights to rape and batter, married women attempting to salvage some degree of bodily autonomy and/or freedom from compulsory serial pregnancy by practicing birth control or abstinence, and women who were prostituted. The historical roots of the 19th century Midwest shivaree were not in a playful hazing of newlyweds, but in a sanctioned, violent policing by gangs of young men over women who, in their eyes,  were not sufficiently sexually subordinate.

Even when church and secular authorities attempted to outlaw charivari, local authorities were reluctant to prosecute these gangs of young men. Possibly, they feared reprisals against their persons or their properties, as coming between young men and what they perceive as their sexual prerogatives can be dangerous. Not surprisingly, when gang rape or other forms of violent assault occurred within the context of a charivari, the sentencing would be considerably lighter than under other circumstances.

But by the mid-1600’s, some victims began to push back, lodging formal complaints against the practice. Finally, by the 1700’s, the practice began to decline—first in the cities and eventually in rural areas.

In Green Grow the Lilacs, Riggs is writing about shivaree as practiced in 1900 in Indian Territory. It’s probable that he knew people who had experienced it. In fact, in 1900, Riggs would have been two years old, and his grandparents—if not his parents—may have been witnesses, victims, and/or participants to the kind of shivaree depicted in the play.

Unwelcome statehood looms over Indian Territory in Riggs’ play, as the final stage of a relentless and brutal colonization of the West. The shivaree looms over the protagonists of the play as a final and brutal stage of initiation into their expected gender roles in patriarchal rape culture.

Significantly, the shivaree scene opens at night. It opens as the newlyweds are attempting to sneak back into the farmhouse.  Expressing the hope that nobody knows they have gotten married, they are desperate to avoid a shivaree.  Laurey, the fearful bride, asks, “… if they ketch us, whut’ll happen? Will it be bad?” Her anxious groom responds, “You know about shivorees, honey. They get purdy rough.” He then assures her that they have outsmarted their would-be tormentors, but as they exit the stage, the gang of men enter in excited anticipation of capturing their prey. Their comments reflect their envy of Curly for having scored a bride who comes with “grazin and  timber and plowed land,” as well as physical appeal. Their prurient excitement mounts as they note a light coming on in the bedroom, the lace curtains blowing, and the shadows passing in front of the window. As the men attempt to scale the walls of the house with a ladder, a drunken farmer appears and salaciously shouts, “No time to wait now. Time to git goin’. See that there bride a-glimmerin’ there in her white! Waitin’ fer you. Been standin’ there with her hair down her back and her lips a-movin’. Git next to her, brother! Gonna be high ole times, gonna be Jesus into yer heart!”

The men drag the groom Curly from the house. He is angry and yelling at the men to leave his wife alone. They agree to stop manhandling her as they bring her in. Laurey enters, “pale and shaken” in a nightgown with her hair down.

The men have leaned a ladder up the side of a haystack and they force Laurey to mount it. Then they force Curly to climb up after her, amid lascivious catcalls. When both are at the top, they pull the ladder down. The men have urged the bride to “Make out it’s a bed, why don’t you!” They begin coaching the couple to kiss and for Curly to bite her shoulder and “eat her alive.” As the men’s “orgy of delight” (Riggs' description)  increases in its frenzy, one of the men calls out “Ain’t no right to be in no nightgown!” Another man taunts the bride, “How’s it feel to be married, Laurey, sugar, all safe and proper, to sich a fine purty man with curly hair and a dimple on his chin! Whee! Got you whur I want you—” The men begin to toss straw babies up to the top of the haystack, counting them out as they mock the couple.

Suddenly Curly cries out that the haystack is on fire. He begs for the ladder to be replaced, but the men ignore him as Jeeter (the Judd Fry character in Oklahoma!) enters with a torch. Curly jumps down and a fight ensues. Laurey climbs down from the haystack in time to witness the death agony of Jeeter.  The scene ends with Laurey in shock, repeating “He laid there in the stubble, so quiet, th’ his eyes open, and his eyeballs white and starin’! He laid there in the stubble—th’ his eyes open—!

The shivaree is not gratuitous violence.  It is the pivot of the play, in which Riggs has initially depicted the community as wholesome and even puritanical, counterposed against Jeeter’s solitary indulgence in pornography. But with the shivaree scene,  the black-and-white moral world of the play is turned inside out. Under cover of darkness, the upstanding citizens of the town transform themselves into rapists and terrorists. What is Riggs telling us here? And how does it fit with the context of an indigenous territory about to become annexed as a state?

In the subsequent scene, three days later, Curly is in jail awaiting a form of prairie justice that may or may not honor his plea of self-defense. Laurey, sleepless, has been hiding in her room since the shivaree. She emerges in the lamplight, “looking very pale and changed, years older, a woman now.” Her speech indicates that she is distracted and dissociated, dwelling on the events of the shivaree:

When her aunt attempts to comfort her, Laurey insists that she can never forget what she’s seen: “Over and over! The way the men done. The things they said. Oh—why’d it have to be that-away!”

Finally, Aunt Eller admits the futility of attempting to forget. This is the pivotal speech of the play: “They’s things you cain’t get rid of—lots of things. Not if you live to be a hundred. You got to learn. You got to look at all the good on one side and all the bad on the other, and say ‘Well, all right, then!’ to both of ‘em.”

And with that, and a few more speeches about how hard a woman’s life is, Laurey  admits she’s been “sich a baby” and becomes, what the playwright intends us to understand as an adult woman.  Here is her transformative speech:

“I’ve thought about that awful night, too, until I thought I’d go crazy… Looked at it time and again, heared it—ringin’ in my ears! Cried about it, cried about everything! A plumb baby! And I’ve tried to figure out how it would be if sump’n did happen to you. Didn’t know how I could stand it. That was the worst! And nen, I tried to figger out how I could go on. Oh, I’ve went th’ough it all...from the start. Now I feel shore of sump’n, anyway—I’ll be growed up—like everybody else. I’ll put up with everything now. You don’t need to worry about me no more.”

Laurey has accepted her annexation into the role of wife and mother. She will forget what she has experienced at the hands of the town’s citizens. She will put up with everything now.

Riggs was a gay Cherokee playwright, born in Indian Territory in 1899. He was a disappointment to his father, a banker and a rancher. Photographs of Riggs show him to be a man of slight build, something of an “egghead” with his glasses and premature balding. What was his experience with the hypermasculinity and heteronormativity of the West? Did he experience hazing and bullying as a rite of passage? Did he learn to “stand it” in order to become an adult?  Is he telling us something about the survival of his people, as each new generation has had to face a heritage of ongoing violence, denigration, and theft?

The musical adaptation has appropriated Riggs’ deeply disturbing play in order to generate a post-war celebration of America, and especially of American expansionism.  (Hawaii and Alaska were still territories when the musical opened.)  Male violence, which Riggs characterizes as central to the enforcement of "family values," is relegated to the perverted outsider (Jeeter), who can be easily exorcized. In fact, Oklahoma! tells a colonizer's fanciful story--personal and politcal.

Green Grow the Lilacs is an Indian play, and its significance far outweighs its role as appropriated source material for Oklahoma!  The play stands on its own merits and occupies a critical place in Native American drama, documenting a pivotal time in history. Riggs' treatment of the shivaree as a paradigm for colonization/annexation is still ahead of its time. 

I have a friend named Elliott, who is a disabled, radical, working-class, Jewish, lesbian-feminist activist. She wrote an interesting article about the political implications of the contents of the supplemental dictionary of her word-processing program. The supplemental dictionary is a file that allows the user to customize the spell-check program by adding words that are not in the default dictionary that came with the program. Here is a partial list of words from Elliott’s file:
ableism
ableist
accessibility
Ashkenazic
assimilationist
batterer
classism
classist
clit
dyke
Eurocentric
feminisms
futon
heterosex
heteropatriarchal
homelessness
ism
lesbophobia
miso
mythologize
sephardic
sizeism
tampax
tempeh
therapism
yiddishe

Obviously, the words that are critical to Elliott’s defining her experience—not only her day-to-day reality, but also her identities and her oppressions—are missing. The point of Elliott’s article was to make visible the usually invisible process of marginalization. What does it mean when “tits” is in the dictionary, but “clit” is not? What does it mean when there is a term for hating queers, but not one specific to the combination of homophobia and misogyny? What does it mean when “ablebodied” is in the dictionary, but “ableism” is not? What does it mean when every conceivable category for christian sects and denominations is included, but the words descriptive of Jewish ethnic origins are not? What does it mean when all the pejorative terms for poor people are in the dictionary, but “classism” is not?

Elliott’s printout of the contents of her supplemental dictionary file makes visible a process that is usually hidden. The printout not only exposes a mechanism of exclusion, but it also suggests connections and patterns of oppression among her diverse identities.

What is missing from the traditional canon of dramatic literature? Turning to the supplemental file of my own canon of plays, I find that nearly all of the archetypes I use are absent from the traditional canon: the avenging mother, the survivor of sexual assault who is believed, the angry young woman, the ambitious winner, the fiercely loyal sisters, the venerated crone, the lesbian lover. My archetypal narratives are also missing: the sanctioned patricide, the woman’s resurrection through rage, the recovery of memory, the shifting of paradigms, the de-colonization of the body, the furious re-invention of the self, the reconstruction of the ruptured mother-daughter bond.

There are many archetypes in my lesbian-feminist culture that are missing from the traditional canon of dramatic literature. As with Elliott’s supplemental dictionary, I find it instructive to examine these omissions for what they reveal about that mainstream canon. These archetypes include the rejected older woman who, instead of becoming consumed with revenge like Medea, liberates
herself joyously from the entire heterosexual paradigm that would put her out to pasture at menopause. In the patriarchal canon, the archetypal survivor is Cassandra, whose ability to predict the future is seen as a curse, not a strategic advantage, because no one will believe her. In my culture, the survivor of male atrocities uses her second sight to heal herself and to rescue and recruit other victimized women. In our epic dramas, the daughter, unlike Elektra, sides with the mother against a perpetrating father, and our goddesses, unlike the motherless Athena, endorse the patricide of the perpetrator, not the matricide of the avenging mother. Our Antigones, longing for a voice in the political process, are not satisfied with impotent and self-martyring protests against a sadistic, misogynist system, but seek out the alliances with other powerful women. We have a literature
replete with warrior women from long lines of unbroken matrilineal bonding. Why are these rich roles and archetypes missing from a canon that purports to be universal?


I suggest that it is because of the censorship of incest as a subject fit for inclusion in the canon. If we believe the statistics that tell us one third of all girls are sexually abused before the age of eighteen, usually by a male caregiver, the case could be made that incest is the central paradigm for women in patriarchy. Incest is the template for a woman’s experience of betrayal by her fathers and her brothers. When the mother is forced to choose between the interests of her male partner or male offspring, and the interests of her daughter, she will most often align her interests with what will give her the most stake in a male-dominated system. Sadly, most mothers will reject their sexually abused daughters. And here we see the Cassandra who cannot erase her memory of trauma, but who cannot find the women—or the men—who will believe her. Here we see the Clytemnestra, who, in
avenging the murder of her daughter, falls victim to another daughter and a son who identify with the perpetrating father. Here is Medea who avenges her sexual rejection on the younger woman and on her own children. Here is Athena, defining the father as the true parent, the one who provides the “seed,” and the mother as only the empty carrier, the borrowed womb.

When incest is not named, when the incest story is not told, it becomes the accepted paradigm, part of the default lexicon for defining accepted reality.
In preparing this paper, I asked the members of my theatre newsgroup for titles of plays that dealt with child sexual abuse/incest. I say “child-sexual-abuse-slash-incest,” because, in my experience of working with survivors, the two are most often synonymous, or, at least, very closely related in terms of scenarios and syndromes.

The first thing I noticed from the list of titles was that the “slash” has disappeared. There is almost no connection at all between the portrayal of incest and child sexual abuse in the majority of these plays. Incest as a titillating scenario of adult desire is a recurrent theme. Child sexual abuse is all but absent.
A sampling of incest titles from the traditional and contemporary canon include: Oedipus Rex, Phaedre, Pericles, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Desire Under the Elms, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Ghosts, Fool for Love.

Lots of stepmother-stepson adult attraction, lots of half-brother-half-sister adult attraction, and a couple of cases of adult parent-child, mistaken-identity attraction. I know and have worked with hundreds of incest survivors, and not one of our stories even remotely resembles any of these. In fact, I don’t know anyone whose story resembles these. The popularity of these models for incest must be attributable to either the fantasies or the subconscious fears of the male playwrights who employ them as plot devices.

Moving away from incest to plays that deal with child sexual abuse, we find the field thins out considerably. Almost all of the plays in this category are recent ones. One of the oldest is Turn of the Screw, with its suggestions of sexual abuse by a tutor and a governess. Part of the much-touted mystery of this play, however, is the fact that audiences never know if the story is true or just the neurotic, projected, sexual fantasies of a frustrated spinster. There are two contemporary plays about child sexual abuse set in all-male environments, focusing on the fate of the perpetrator in prison communities: Lilies and Short Eyes.

Two of the suggested titles finally dealt with experiences of child-sexual-abuse-slash-incest. The first is Nuts, a play by Tom Torpor that was made into a feature film starring Barbra Streisand—a film which, unlike other Streisand films, received almost no critical attention. The protagonist is a prostituted woman who has murdered a john. During the course of her trial, she recovers repressed
childhood memories of paternal incest.

And then there is How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel, which has just won a Pulitzer. In this play an older girl is sexually abused by her uncle. What does it mean that a play on the traditionally taboo subject of incest has been officially recognized by being awarded the Pulitzer? Is this a sign that the silence about incest is being broken, or just a subtler form of censorship. In order to answer
that question it is important to look carefully at the depiction of the survivor in How I Learned to Drive, and it is also important to understand something about the process of a child when she is sexually abused, especially by a trusted adult or caregiver, as is the case in Ms. Vogel’s play.

The experience of the sexually-abused child is this: “This can’t be happening to me” and “This is happening to me and I can’t stop it.” There is a variation on that second part: “This is happening to me and it’s going to keep happening to me, night after night, for years and years and years, and I can’t stop it.” Obviously, “This can’t happen” and “This is happening” are mutually exclusive propositions. To accommodate them in one body, the mind splits off the second part--the
unthinkable, the unspeakable part. Some children literally experience themselves rising up to a corner of the room and watching it all from the ceiling. Others spontaneously repress the memory as it happens. In the case of Marilyn Van Derber, a former Miss America who was raped by her father for years, she had a “day child” and a “night child” identity. The “night child” had no communication with the “day child,” until Van Derber was in her 30’s and began to recover her
memories, the recovery apparently triggered by her daughter having reached the age at which her own abuse had begun.

Some children experience displacement. A typical episode of displacement involved a child who was raped by a friend of her father’s while her father held her down. During the rape she focused on a poster of a rock star that was on the wall, and afterwards she “remembered” the abuse being perpetrated by someone whose description tallied with that of the rock star. She successfully displaced the identity of the rapist to protect herself from information too dangerous to access.
In some cases, the child does not travel to the corner of the room, but instead, she merges her identity with that of the perpetrator. In this syndrome, referred to as “fusion with the perpetrator, “ the child identifies with him during the abuse, adopting a pornographic perspective toward her own body as “other.” Because of her complete lack of agency, it is safer to identify with the experience of the perpetrator than with her own. The child who experiences fusion during the trauma learns, as a survival skill, to become aroused by her own pain, fear, and humiliation.

Most survivors split off not only the incest, but also various emotional affects associated with the experience. The child whose natural instinct would be to fight off or even kill her assailant is obviously in a dilemma if this assailant is a primary caregiver on whom her survival depends. In cases of incest, normal healthy emotional responses can jeopardize the life of a child and she may develop completely various dissociative states to store these taboo and life-threatening emotions and behaviors. Rage at her rapist and grief at the betrayal are two of the strongest and most taboo emotions for the survivor, and it may be very difficult for the victim to access these, even later in life, because of her early association of these emotions with life-threatening conditions.

Getting back to How I Learned to Drive and the Pulitzer… Ms. Vogel’s play is an accurate depiction of a certain type of incest, in which the girl is older and the perpetrator is not violent and poses as someone supportive of her interests. In situations like these, it is common for the victim to feel complicitous, to mistake the perpetrator’s predation for a “relationship,” and to romanticize or sentimentalize the experience. Her confusion stems from the still-necessary repression of rage and grief.

Does this have anything to do with its official recognition? I maintain that it has everything to do with it. The key to that Pulitzer lies in what is missing from the canon: the incest play from the perspective of a recovered survivor—the survivor who has integrated her rage and her grief and who understands her experience in the context of a male-dominant culture dependent on the sexual subordination of women.

Ms. Vogel’s play was praised for the “humanity” with which she treated her subject. She was also praised for depicting the “complexity” (read “mutuality?”) of incest, the fact that is not always so “black and white.” They praised her even-handedness in the sympathetic portrayal of the perpetrator, the confusion of the victim. In other words, the majority of the critics were not noticing that the point-of-view was pathological, that the victim was still deeply dissociative. But in order to
notice this, they would have to notice the lack of anger or grief. I submit that her critics did not miss the anger or grief at all, and, furthermore, I submit that she received the Pulitzer precisely because that anger and that grief were missing. She told an incest story in which there is not political context, in which the act itself is as isolated as a tree falling in the woods, in which the perpetrator is not a sadistic predator, but “merely” a loser. Her survivor is resigned, superior, moving on. How poignant, how handy.

How I Learned to Drive is not the only dissociative narrative being valorized as the whole story. There are several well-known performance artists, women and self-declared survivors of horrendous sexual abuse, who tour to colleges and universities where they take their clothes off and even recreate scenarios of sexual abuse in the name of sexually liberating themselves or protesting the
objectification of women. Performance art critics have written tomes of theory about these artists, none of which incorporates a shred of theory about trauma and recovery.

What if these “radical porn feminist activists” are actually partially-recovered survivors still in the “acting out” phase of early recovery? What if the replication of traumatic scenarios under these more controlled and therefore subjectively more empowering circumstances (no pimps, no johns) is part of their process in integrating? What if the audience is watching an unrecovered survivor
parade her pathologies in front of us in an articulate, but still incoherent attempt to tell her story and integrate? What if these are not sexually liberated adult women at all, but women who are still slaves to their traumatized childhoods?

One sure way of finding out would be to compare their performances and their narratives to the work of recovered survivors, whose narratives incorporate anger toward the perpetrator and a full sense of the lost entitlement of safety and agency, with the cultural context in which their abuse occurred as subtext. But these narratives are conspicuous in their absence. The story of the fully integrated
survivor is missing, even as the survivor who sentimentalizes her perpetrator or who recreates her own abuse for mass consumption receives the official endorsement of the mainstream.

Why aren’t more women noticing and protesting this absence, this censorship? Well, let’s imagine we are at a play right now. And let’s assume that those of you who are listening to this paper are the audience. Let’s break it down: Half of you are women. For every three women in the audience, one will have been sexually abused as a child, most likely in a situation involving incest with a male
perpetrator. Let us consider that those women, those women who comprise one third of the female audience. Do they remember at all? Many will not. If these women do remember, how have they dealt with it? More to the point, with whom are they sitting? Probably with family. Would those seat companions be there if she remembered, if she told? If the companion is a spouse, would he welcome the inevitable disinheritance, the stigma, the disruption of childcare arrangements, the
awkwardness at family gatherings? Is he up for the financial and emotional demands of the healing process? If she’s there with parents, would she lose one? Both? And how many siblings? Most of these women will have tried to forget or ignore. Frequently they are helped out in this by dissociative disorders which keep the memory conveniently disconnected from the emotions, which have been hermetically sealed off in other parts of the psyche. And here How I Learned to Drive, with its deeply dissociative heroine, will provide reassurance and validation. This play will be much more comfortable for the woman in denial than a play about a recovered survivor.

If these survivors in our audience are inclined to be religious, they can mistake this dissociation for forgiveness or transcendence, as did the critics of How I Learned to Drive. Forgiveness and transcendence are both endorsed as feminine virtues in ways that anger or a sense of entitlement are not.

But maybe these women in our audience have forged an entire identity from their fusion with the perpetrator. Maybe they experience themselves as sexually liberated, because they revel in the recreations of scenarios of their abuse. Certainly a pornographically-inclined partner will not be likely to complain. In fact, mainstream culture will endorse the woman who enjoys acting out sexually against herself. One could, in fact, make the case that this is the point of incest. If this third
of our female audience is still experiencing fusion with the perpetrator, they might enjoy the work of performers who treat their own bodies as “other,” and who arouse themselves with self-violation.

But what if this audience is not identified with the perpetrator? Then they are likely to react to this kind of “performance art” with sexual shock, retreating into the various dissociative states to which they have become habituated. Or maybe they are further along in their healing than the performer and they are feeling anger toward the rest of the audience for their exploitation of an obvious survivor. But if these women express this opinion, if they protest what is going on, or if they walk
out of the theatre, they will be labeled puritans, members of the sex police, feminazis. They are greatly at risk of calling attention to themselves as survivors, which is very dangerous in a situation where sexual predation is being encouraged. She may feel trapped with dangerous perceptions she
cannot articulate. If she is on a road to integrating, she may be forced back into splitting, and this is tremendously destructive of the healing process.

What is my point?

My point is that the canon is skewed, that the depictions of child sexual abuse that are allowed serve an agenda to marginalize the voice of the recovered survivor. My point is that we cannot possibly understand what we are seeing on the stage, nor can we theorize about it, until we have allowed all the voices of incest survivors to be heard, and especially the voices of those who have integrated
their experience and who can make the larger connections between a culture that looks the other way when girls are raped and then turns around and markets their damaged sexuality as role models for all women.

[Originally presented at Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference, Toronto, 1999.]

 The bathroom has been a site of "gender anxiety" historically, as well as a battlefield, and, although it is tempting to write this off to ignorance about gender and fanatical, knee-jerk policing of the "gender binary," the issue goes deeper than this.

Rapists do choose public bathrooms as sites of sexual predation, and the presence of men in traditionally female spaces is often dangerous. On the other hand, there is a biological and cultural gender continuum among humans, and a gender binary is oppressive and dangerous for people who are not easily identified, or who do not identify, as male or female. Transgender women and masculine women are harassed and humiliated when we attempt to use public facilities. What is the "politically correct" attitude toward gender presentation when the ability to identify a stranger's biological sex in an isolated environment can be a question of life or death? What happens when queer theory butts up against the intensely polarized reality of male violence against women?

These were the questions on my mind when I wrote The Ladies' Room, a six-minute play about a bathroom confrontation. The play opens in a ladies' room at a shopping mall. A woman has just gone to report to the security guard that there is a man in the bathroom. The "man" is actually Rae, a teenage, lesbian butch. Angry and humiliated in front of her partner, Rae is hurling taunts and insults directed toward the woman complainant. Her teen girlfriend, Nicole, is uncomfortable about the dynamic, and the two begin to argue.

When Nicole expresses concern that public bathrooms are the third most common public site for sexual assault, Rae ridicules her for buying into an urban myth. As Nicole defends herself, it becomes apparent that she has been a victim of a stranger rape in a public space. Rae is emotionally overwhelmed by this information. At this point, her accuser is seen returning with the security guard, and Rae has to make a decision about how to respond.

Responses to the play have been strong and personal, especially by women who experience frequent challenges about their sexual identity. In my play, Rae chooses not to run away at the end, but to go out to meet the security guard and voluntarily offer her gender credentials in the form of her driver's license. Several women took exception to that ending, feeling that Rae was enabling of her own oppression in making that gesture. One of my critics, who has experienced humiliating official pat-downs in airport bathrooms, expressed the belief that the women who challenge her appearance are not concerned about rape, but are just trying to impose their class-based sense of a "gender dress code."

Another masculine woman, who actually lived a passing life as a man for several years, took a different approach. She was a victim of a gang rape, and she told me that when she is confronted in bathrooms, she draws attention to the fact that she has breasts and is a woman, and then she thanks her accuser for her vigilance. This woman identifies as a radical feminist, and, for her, it is a priority not to shame her confronters or in any way, punish them, or make them uncomfortable for their vigilance about the possibility of a man being in a woman's space.

The two actors who performed the play this summer at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival shared their own recent experience with unisex bathrooms. They had attended a large conference for queer-identified youth, and one of the first things the attendees did was to convert all of the bathrooms on their hotel floor to "gender-free." The actors commented that women using these bathrooms were constantly exposed to the sight of men's genitals, as the men were using the urinals and also leaving the doors open to the stalls when they used them. The women reported their feelings of shock and discomfort, noting that it would not have been safe for them to express these responses in the context of the conference, which was focused on the safety of trans youth.

The controversial ending of The Ladies' Room was not intended to represent a solution. In the play, the character makes the gesture as an attempt to remedy her perceived insensitivity to her partner's rape history. The play is designed to initiate dialogue between feminists and genderqueer allies.

[Originally published in On the Issues: The Progressive Woman's Magazine, August 18, 2009.]